School of War - Grading Operation Epic Fury, with Christian Brose

Episode Date: May 19, 2026

Christian Brose, president and chief strategy officer of Anduril Industries and author of The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare, joins the show to help us evaluate American performance against Iran so far and discuss the state of defense innovation in America. What is on the cutting edge? Where are we falling behind? And what happens if the war comes home?  Times: 01:58 - Audit of Operation Epic Fury 05:04 - Munitions and weapons shortages 08:30 - New lower-cost weapons 10:56 - The Barracuda cruise missile system 15:04 - Lessons from the battlefield 15:41 - Missile defense systems 21:47 - Software, data, and AI 24:39 - Homeland defense 27:02 - Containerization 28:05 - Industrial capacity 31:36 - Bringing Americans back into defense manufacturing 34:43 - The defense budget 39:02 - Anduril fundraising Follow along on Instagram, X @schoolofwarpod, and YouTube @SchoolofWarPodcast Find more at The Free Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming, Ontario. It's been said that war is an audit of a nation's capacity to fight. Well, looking back now on Operation Epic Theory, we're going to do a little bit of an audit today in a fascinating conversation with Chris Brose, the president and chief strategy officer of Andrel. Let's get into it. It is a perspective for war this Lockhean invasion of away. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in any day.

If a bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a state. We continue to face a great situation in France. Fight on the beaches. It will fight on the landing ground. We'll fight in the fields and in the streets, which will never surrender. Hey, everyone. I'm here to tell you about a great new podcast from the free press. It's called The Lindbergh conspiracies, hosted by Joe Nossera.

And the show covers one of the most famous and controversial crimes in America. American history, the kidnapping of the Lindberg baby. You probably know the basic story in 1932, the infant son of Charles Lindbergh disappeared from the family's home in New Jersey. The case became a national obsession. The press covered every detail. Millions of Americans followed every development. A suspect was arrested, convicted, and eventually executed. But nearly a century later, many people still believe the official story doesn't fully add up. The series dives into the endless theories that have surrounded the case for decades, that the wrong man was convicted, that evidence was manipulated, that authorities rushed to close the case, and even the theory that Lindbergh himself

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But did they get the wrong man? And did this botched case spark America's obsession with conspiracies? from me, Joe Nossera, creator of the podcast turned Apple TV series The Shrink Next Door, and the team behind Audible smash hit Agatha Christie and the Dandelion Poisoner. The Free Press presents the Lindberg Conspiracies. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I am delighted to welcome back to the show today, Chris Brose. He's the president and chief strategy officer of Anderil.

He's also the author of a book from now six. years ago called the kill chain, which we're going to talk about a bunch of stuff today in terms of the defense industrial base, attributable mass, autonomy, data management. I feel like your book was kind of out ahead of the pack and sort of predicting what the world would look like in terms of defense policy and requirements in the middle of this decade. Yeah, I'd like to think so. I think it's held up pretty well. I'm not looking to do like a second edition. There's no sequel. So it's just going to have to stand on its own and hopefully it weather's the test of time. Chris, I'm going to open us up with a very big picture question for you.

I have heard it said that war is an audit of militaries and of national capacity for warmaking. We just had a pretty intense episode of war with Operation Epic Fury in Iran. And I want to ask you, what are the results of the audit thus far? because obviously there could be more conflict here in the short run between us and Iran. But how do the results of the audit thus far look to you? Mixed, I think. You know, I think it's indisputable that the United States was able to inflict an enormous amount of military damage on the Iranian government.

It's war-making ability, obviously together with, you know, with Israel. You know, there's an enormous amount of senior leadership and sort of industrial base and military capacity that doesn't exist anymore because of just the remarkable capabilities of the United States military and obviously our Israeli allies. I think at the same time, you know, the challenges that we're seeing just in the several weeks of that operation are pretty apparent and undeniable. You know, I actually wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal prior to the war starting, you know, talking about concerns in, you know, critical munitions, stockpiles, the need to make different kinds of investments in different classes of kind of lower cost weaponry.

You know, and I think that we're seeing the, you know, the effects of a lot of that in the, in the current, you know, in the, in the audit of the operation where, you know, just what I've seen through public reporting, I mean, we shot about eight years worth of Tomahawk production in the first, you know, week or two of the war. Like, that's a lot of weapons that we don't have very many of, that takes a very long time and a lot of money to build back. So I think the, The deeper question or the answer to your deeper question is, I think that it continues to show us that one of the critical assumptions that we have built the U.S. military around for the past generation is wrong, which is we don't have to be concerned and sized and shaped and ready for protracted conflict. You know, the kind of conflict that we've seen in Ukraine and, frankly, all of American history, you know, I don't think that we are currently capable of engaging in that type of warfare. not with the military we have. The military we have can do remarkable things as we've seen in Iran,

as we've seen in Venezuela, but it is not able to do all of the things that, you know, I think people wanted to do, certainly not be able to do it as a function of time. And I think there's an interesting counterfactual about the question of an audit of, and I know Ukraine is a big interest of yours, if we had learned the lessons of Ukraine better or differently or at all several years ago and begun making different decisions and different kinds of investments, you know, might the first several weeks of the war actually gone much differently, you know, in addition to the successes that we have had, might we have been able to head off some of the concerns that we've seen in terms of munitions shortfall, closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the ability of the Iranian government to continue to,

project power through one-way attack drones and, you know, suicide boats and, you know, other types of, you know, kind of low-cost military capabilities, you know, I think there's a decent case to be made that, you know, that would have gone quite differently if we had learned different lessons several years ago, you know, under the previous regime or the previous administration. So your answer raises the obvious question, which I guess is as much a psychology question as anything else, but whether you want to take it back to 2022 and the moment where no one could really ignore that we have an aluminum munitions crisis anymore by, you know, spring, summer, 2022. But frankly, going even further back to when you were staff director of the Senate

Armed Services Committee working for Senator McCain a decade ago, it's not like the professionals didn't know that these liabilities existed and were baked in. So how is it, Chris, that in 26, we can stick with munitions. We can expand it out to other issues. We are where we are. I think going back to that, you know, 10 years ago when I was in the Senate, I mean, this was apparent. And not only was it apparent, you had an administration at the time that continually showed up with defense budget requests that underinvested in a lot of these critical munitions, even below what we were capable of at the time. The good news was that the Congress on a bipartisan basis didn't go along with that and actually

started increasing funding for these types of critical weapons. And over the past decade, as a nation, we've tripled our spending on weaponry. So when you look at the problem, right, it's not a function of the fact that we're just not spending enough. I mean, we do need to spend more. I think that's undeniable. We can produce more. It's that the money we are spending, the increases, significant increases we are spending,

are not leading to commensurate increases in production. So you're seeing 200, 300 percent increases in funding, but you're only seeing production move 14 percent, 23 percent, you know, for things like SM6 or El Razum or Tomahawk, weapons, Patriot, things that everybody now knows by name. So the deeper problem, I think, is the way these weapons were designed. They're very old. They're made in very artisanal and manual ways. And that just throwing more money at it does not necessarily get you the volume of weaponry that you want.

And I think the bigger problem is we're not even close, I think, to the number of weapons we really need. And I think Ukraine has shown us that. I think even a couple of weeks of Epic Fury has shown us that years of war games against China has shown us that. I mean, we're off by an order of magnitude or more. So, you know, even if we could, you know, build back the numbers that we're talking about, we're still going to be woefully short of what we need to say nothing of having to think in a multidimensional way against, you know, a series of global actors or a series of actors who are acting globally in a threatening way that we have to be, you know, ready and postured and

prepared to defend against. So to me, this is a really essential point that you're making, because I hear it said in all sorts of quarters right now that the munitions expenditure from Epic Fury puts us into some kind of window of vulnerability with China. That may be true. But to me, the more important point is a version of what you just said, which is actually Actually, what Epic Fury shows is that the math would never have worked with China. We could have not done Epic Fury at all, and we would still be in a window of vulnerability. The math just doesn't work. Yes.

Let me ask, so again, we can stick with munitions. We can zoom out to other issues, but your point about how you can throw all the money you want at building new, Tomahawks, standard missiles, whatever, and you're just not getting the increases in production you need. So presumably you're not going to suggest that that's the solution as we just figure out how to build more and more of the exquisite stuff. What is the solution? If you read the headlines about Israel, you're only getting a tiny slice of a long, complicated story without depth, context, or sometimes even the basic facts.

I'm Nolm Weissman, the host of unpacking Israeli history, the podcast that dives into the fascinating and sometimes controversial events and figures that have shaped Israel's past and present each week on unpacking Israeli history. I explore the layers of Israeli history. debates around the Palestinian and Israeli conflict, the cultural forces at play, drawing from a variety of sources and perspectives. So if you're looking for a nuanced, thought-provoking take on Israel, one that avoids the oversimplifications and political spin, I think you'll really appreciate the show. Find unpacking Israeli history wherever you listen to your podcast or on YouTube. So I think the answer is a couple of things. So I do actually think that we need to spend more on those traditional. They are weapons we have. They are proven. We've seen what they can do just recently in the case of Iran. Like we do need to we need to build and we need to buy more of them. I think at the same time you need to complement those weapons, those higher end exquisite weapons with larger volumes of lower cost, you know, more producible weapons. So, you know, it was announced this week by the Pentagon that, you know, Anderl in addition to a handful of other companies were selected to, you know, begin mass producing these kinds of lower cost weapons. So an In our case, you know, it's an agreement over the next three years to build a thousand rounds per year of a low-cost cruise missile.

So basically a ground-launched, you know, kind of rocket-propelled weapon that is ultimately going to, you know, fly and perform and maneuver like a cruise missile, fly several hundred miles, you know, carry a pretty big warhead on it. So, right, these are not, you know, quadcopters or one-way attack drones. These are things that are, you know, they look like traditional munitions. they just cost a fraction of what, you know, a similar sort of more exquisite, more exotic weapon, you know, from, you know, from our critical munitions lines would come in at price wise. So, you know, it's a huge credit to the Trump administration to finally start doing the things that people have been saying we should do and talking about doing, but, you know, they're actually putting money behind this and they're making bets on new entrants to build new kinds of weapons differently. So, you know, when you look at these kind of critical munitions, that all of us are familiar with. They're delivering hundreds per year. They take years to build. They're extremely expensive.

So the fact that just are part of this to say nothing of the other companies that are involved, building 1,000 missiles per year, scaling up to be able to do far more than that as a function of time, you're now starting to get different kind of inventory into the hands of the warfighter to generate the right kind of deterrence, to be able to have a very different outcome

and sustain this as a function of time. These are weapons that can be built relatively cheaply. Most of their underlying components are sourced from commercial supply chains. They're contract manufactured. There's an enormous amount of surge capacity to ramp up if that's the decision of the government. So again, it's just an entirely different approach to how we design and how we build weapons. And again, the administration deserves a huge amount of credit for finally doing this. This could have been done two, three years ago.

Should have been done two, three years ago. My argument, you know, it's like the old saying, like, best time to plant a tree was years ago and today, you know, better late than never. Let's get going. And a huge amount of credit for them finally getting going. This is the barracuda. Yes. So let's, just to make this a little bit more concrete and visual, let's talk a little bit about the barracuda. So, you know, I have no idea how many tomahawks or equivalent we produce a year, but you have these high-end cruise missile systems. Yeah. That talk about why as a commander, you've got your high-end stuff, but you've got your less capable, but it. It will still blow things up and kill people stuff.

You know, just paint a picture of employment decisions and how this will actually work on the battlefield in combination with the higher end stuff we already have. Yeah. So the argument that we've always made and we've done an enormous amount of operational analysis that backs this up. The answer isn't one or the other. The answer is both, right? So our argument is not, you know, get rid of all the legacy stuff, stop buying tomahawks, stop buying, you know, jasms and other things. We need to buy all of that. The problem is that if that's all you have, that's all you'll use.

And that's the dilemma that we've been seeing in Iran where, you know, we're shooting down, you know, relatively cheap one-way attack drones with very expensive Patriot missiles or standard missiles, things we don't have a lot of. They cost a lot. And once you lose them, it takes years to rebuild those stockpiles. You need those weapons, right? But those weapons are optimized to solve incredibly hard problems. The problem is because that's all we have, we use them to solve every problem. So, you know, it's like taking your kids to school in a Ferrari when it's like, guys, like the minivan will do. Like, let's just use that because it's like cheap and easy and available.

The problem is we haven't made the investment as a country to build up that other side of the ledger. Those low-cost cruise missiles are in the case of Castilian, low-cost hypersonic missiles. You know, we've had the industrial base to do this. I mean, Andril's been around a long time. You know, we're now ready to, you know, to do this kind of work. But the benefit for the operational, you know, the commander who has to make these decisions is if you have both of these capabilities, rather than shooting multiple high-end expensive, exquisite weapons, because most of our doctrine calls for that, right? In missile defense, you know, the old adage is sort of shoot, shoot, look and then shoot again. So, you know, for every inbound threat, you're shooting multiple weapons just to guarantee that you're striking it. If you're going, you know, to strike targets in Iran in the case of Epic Fury, You're going to shoot a lot of tomahawk missiles or, you know, join air to surface, standoff munitions. And if that's all you have, that's all you'll use.

But the ability to blend one of those weapons with a larger volume of the barracuda. So rather than shooting eight weapons, you're going to shoot one of those exquisite weapons and like two dozen barracudas. And the ultimate cost of that salvo is less than what you otherwise would have shot. And it's more operationally effective because it's a larger volume of fire going at the target. It's harder for the adversary to detect, defend against, defeat. And that one exquisite weapon that you do have and you are using has a much higher probability of getting in, doing the thing that you needed to do, having a higher probability of hit, higher probability of kill. And that's exactly what we want. So in a way, this kind of high-low mix, as we've been talking about, you know, is actually a way of extending our, you know, our current inventory.

is, right, this kind of scarce supply that we have of these very exquisite weapons to go over a much, much longer period of time because you're complimenting them with, you know, a whole world or family of these lower cost, more producible weapons. Yeah, I think this is probably something that the guy on the street doesn't necessarily visualize is that just the reason for the consumption, in part, is due to the volley fire nature of the tactics you're going to use. In the Marine Corps, we would say anything that's worth shooting once, it's worth shooting 40 or 50 times. Yes. If you have an important target in Iran or where have you, you're not going to fire just one missile. You're going to fire a volley of missiles. And you're going to try to, in your conception, hide the really good missile amidst a cloud of lower-bally missiles. And the purpose of the weapons that we're building may actually be not to make it to the target, right?

They may be there to draw fire and attention on the ground so that one exquisite weapon can get in and do the thing that you needed to do. It makes it more survivable, makes it more effective. So again, it's this whole question of how do we get mass back? on our side, right? We keep seeing these lessons from the battlefields of the present and the recent past that mass is back. It is a critical factor in warfare always has been. We thought for like past, you know, a couple of few decades that maybe that wasn't true anymore. It's back. It's very true. This is, I think, our answer and America's answer to how do you get mass back on our side, but not at the expense of the very exquisite, very, you know, remarkably capable weapons that we have relied

upon for the past several decades, but in addition to them. So far, we've been talking about offensive systems. Let's talk about defense, missile defense, air defense. This is another area where I think the audit would show we had some shortcomings over the course of Epic Fury. I mean, based on the public reporting I've seen, we took some real hits in the Gulf. The naval station in Bahrain, not too usable at the moment. We've had aircraft destroyed on the ground, included Prince Sultan in Saudi Arabia.

Some partners have taken shots as well. Absolutely. And of note, you know, during the shooting, we were bringing in the Ukrainians, literally Ukrainian personnel and their gear to help us talk about the future of missile defense, low altitude air defense, just air defense in general. Yeah. I think the problem that we've had for a long time is that we've always envisioned missile defense as, you know, what the military calls point defense, right? We're trying to defend a very small piece of geography, a single base or headquarters, detachment of troops, and that we're not assuming that we're going to have to defend it against a large volley of incoming fire that is going to be sustainable as a function of time for a very long time, right? The assumption has always been small area to defend, small quantity of weapons coming in,

weak adversary that doesn't have a lot of ability to shoot for a very long time. And I think all of that is not true anymore. So we see a missile defense architecture and a missile defense enterprise that is just quite archaic in terms of the challenge that is now being called upon to address, which is wide area defense, right? The kinds of things that the Ukrainians have had to become quite good at, right, which is not how do I defend a single base, you know, a single city block, but an entire city, you know, which just requires a massive volume of sensors, a massive volume of weapons. It creates a massive big data problem of how do I make sense of all of this information and turn it into time sensitive or real-time targeting and operations, which has to be automated, right? It has to be as a function of artificial intelligence and machine learning.

And then the real kicker is how do I sustain this for months, right, for years, potentially? And that's not what we've sized our missile defense, you know, force and capability and industrial base to be able to do. So if you remember several years back, I forget when, you know, the Iranians fired a huge volley of, you know, ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, one-way attack drones at Israel. You know, we did a remarkable job as a country together with Israel, defending against, you know, I think it was 270 or 280. This is twice in 2020. Yeah. And, you know, it was a remarkable achievement.

Now, when you then sort of do the audit and say, okay, well, we've just spent about a budget. billion dollars of weapons in a single day. And if we had had to do this the next day and the next week and the next month, I don't think that would have gone so well. So the question is, how do you move to this different model where you're defending much larger areas? You have to do it with a much larger volume of sensors and weapons. You have to automate all of that. And then you have to do this as a function of protracted conflict. Yeah. And I don't think that we are where we are and where we need to be on that. And, you know, again, back to your question of audit.

These are lessons as a country that, you know, we easily could have learned. And to some extent we learned, we just weren't acting upon the learnings that we were actually, you know, I think taking away from Ukraine in terms of the way we needed to be reshaping our investments in counter drone, air and missile defense. I mean, this is an area that Anderl has been working in since 2018, 2019, you know, began taking counter drone systems out with, you know, joint special operations command to the Middle East and sort of saw all of this, you know, kind of revolution in one-way attack drones and drone warfare kind of unfolding in that region. So there are enormous, you know, opportunities that I think,

you know, as an enterprise, the, you know, the Department of Defense, you know, several years ago easily could have taken advantage of and decided to make, you know, a radical break with the past, make significant investments in the future. And to a large extent that just didn't happen. So now we are where we are, right? So, like, I think the good news is you're now starting to see people taking the lessons from Ukraine and starting to get serious about, you know, yeah, bringing some of these Ukrainian companies that have done some remarkable things on the sensor side and on the, on the interceptor side, you know, kind of into the fold. There's an event going on right now that our team is at and supporting that the Secretary of the Army is kind of directed, which is what they call the right to integrate, which is like done are the days where we're going to have proprietor. dietary black box, you know, sensors and systems sold to us by our defense industrial base. We're going to open all of that stuff up. You're going to have to share your data.

You're going to have to move your data into open software systems with open interfaces. And we're going to have to start modernizing this at the pace of software. These are great things, right? I mean, it could have been done years ago. Thank God they're being done now. Let's stick with the software and the data question, which, you know, if you had told, not to keep going back to the Marine Corps, but if you had told second, Lieutenant McLean, the future of warfare was going to hinge on effective data management.

I think, I think Lieutenant McClain would have curled up into a ball and gone to the corner and asked to not play anymore because it just doesn't sound that exciting. But I mean, like this is you probably would have understood. No, no, I'm being quite. You might have eaten a couple red crayons, but, you know, that's right. You would have gotten it. That's right. I mean, having recently been in Ukraine, like I'm, I knew theoretically before, but now

seen it with my own eyes, how this is a country surviving in its own version of the Spanish Civil War where all of these technologies are being tried by the great powers via proxy and how they've survived essentially through their ability to manage information, to digest all this stuff that's coming in from all these sensors. And what you see reported in the press because it makes better TV and it's easier to talk about this is a drone war. And it is. I mean, unmanned systems are a huge part of the story.

But what's harder to discuss and report and it's also harder to explain to a non-expert audience is yes, but it's the fact that everything's comming. connected to everything else and decisions are being made at the right speed. And that is a software question, a data question and an AI question. How are we doing? How are we doing? So there's the broader we, which is the United States Defense Enterprise. And there's the work that Andrew has been doing in this space where I would say, we as a company, I think, are well positioned and are now, I think, in the middle of a lot of these kind of next generation air defense development type of effort to solve exactly the problem that you're talking about, right? Where the system that we

build in lattice is fundamentally, you know, what the military, what the Marine Corps would refer to as a fire control system, which is very different. I think a lot of people look at software and it's like, you know, Andrew Pallantir, you know, this company, that company, you all build software and all kind of looks the same. I think what's worth taking a second on because I think that it is actually the answer to your question is, you know, the fire control probably. is the real problem that you're talking about, right? So sort of like integrating a bunch of data and, you know, kind of creating a common operating picture, that's useful. But when you get into how are you actually bringing this large volume of data in, how are you fusing it to then

transform that data into target detections, and then be able to task those machines, sensors, or other systems to keep custody of all those different targets that you're tracking in real time so that you can actually employ violence, shoot weapons, shoot electronic warfare systems to defeat those systems, and do all of that in an automated way in microseconds, done by machines, and in a massive scale, right, across massive geographies with massive volumes of data. You're not going to be able to do that in a manual way. You're not going to be able to do that with like human in the loop workflows. This is not, you know, a 72-hour targeting cycle. This is stuff that has to happen automatically. I think the Ukrainians, you know, I'm not an expert by any means. That is a version of what they are doing. That is the essence of what Lattis does. You know, we're now in the center of, you know, the work that the U.S. Army is doing to modernize its, you know, counter drone and short-range air defense command and control. We are doing an enormous amount to support the defensive Guam effort on behalf of the Army, you know, and it's been publicly reported that we're also, you know, pretty central to the Golden Dome for America effort, thinking about,

You know, how you do all of this, you know, across all the layers from, you know, short range, lower tactical types of engagements all the way up to counter hypersonic space-based interceptors, you know, kind of integrating all of that together. So, you know, I would say with respect to the Ukrainians, the big data problem that they have is is a fraction of the one that the United States is going to have when we now start thinking about homeland defense for real, right? Homeland defense was always a throwaway line in the beginning of quadrennial defense reviews, which basically meant, you know, like we've got weak adversaries in big oceans and, you know, everyone's real far away from us. Now we actually have adversaries that are capable of projecting power, conventional power, you know, onto U.S. soil. You know, I think that if we don't believe that an Operation Spider's Web could happen in the United States,

we're fooling ourselves. So this question of how do I do large-scale area defense of American cities, critical infrastructure, military installations, how do I do continental security against all of these different classes of threats, which, you know, I think the Russians are doing this in terms of these blended salvos, right? It's not just the one-way attack drones. It's all the one-way attract drones, plus the ballistic missiles that are doing most of the killing. So it's this, you know, combination of things that I think that we have to be ready for, which again, as a missile defense enterprise, I don't think that we are. We continue to be optimized on certain kinds of

of threats and certain kinds of geographies. But I think what's coming is this massive big data problem that the Ukrainians have had to work through. And I think for the United States military, and certainly when we work in collaboration with our allies and partners, that's an exponentially larger problem than even they've had to deal with. But I think the way that we are working through this with lattice in terms of a software system that is ultimately an AI-enabled fire control system, you know, is the beginnings of how you really start to do this at scale. Yeah, I don't think there's enough appreciation in the general public, and I feel like it's incumbent upon people like us who think about this stuff all the time to make the versions of the point you just made that the war could come home. And we're not talking necessarily, hopefully, pray to God, about nuclear war, which I feel like in the popular conception there's proxy war, there's the threat of great power conflict abroad.

But the only way for that to escalate is it will escalate to some sort of. nuclear conflict, which is too horrible to even imagine. So you don't imagine it. I was like, no, no, no, there are middle levels. And we could wake up. It's entirely realistic. We could wake up to the naval station at Norfolk in flames, airports, power stations, the capabilities that China has that, I mean, you could imagine maybe not today

and after they've been battered in so many rounds. But I could imagine a pre-107 Iran mustering the capability for some kind of limited containerized strike you guys do work in containerization as well yeah the you know barracuda deal that the pentagon announced is all containerized so these will be weapons and shipping containers yeah so this is just camouflaging weapons into hiding in plain sight and also not being limited to the you know traditional launch systems that we also don't have very many of you know high mars launchers or uh you know vertical launch cells in you know naval ships um you know we don't have a lot of those systems either So getting away from that type of infrastructure that you can, you know,

feel large quantities of weapons in ways that you can actually move them around logistically, you know, hide in plain sight to a certain extent. And it also drives the cost down further. This episode is brought to you by Activia. You might already be eating yogurt, but not all yogurts are created equal. Activia contains over one billion probiotics per serving to survive and reach the gut alive. When it comes to gut health, Activia is the number one family doctor-recommended probiotic yogurt brand. Choose Activia. Feel good from the inside out.

Visitactivia.ca for more details. So I don't know if I can prove this with hard evidence, but I find myself optimistic that when it comes to the AI data software questions, just the nature of the American economy, sort of innovation in America, I feel like we're going to get there. And the technological solutions exist. It's a matter of actually paying for what we need to pay for, putting it in the right places, et cetera. If there's a category of this discussion where I feel like maybe you're going to talk me out of it, but borderline grounds for despair, it is raw industrial capacity, especially if China is the comparison point.

Their capacity to manufacture relative to the rest of the world looks a whole heck of a lot like the United States did in the middle of the 20th century, just as we won World War II. It is obviously outpaced us massively. You guys are building a new manufacturing facility out in Ohio. So you're thinking about this problem. Let me put it to this way. On the assumption that we can't just wake up today

and just build enough factories to match China, that that's just not realistic on any kind of financial or time curve that matters. How do we build out manufacturing capacity more smartly? that we're competitive enough that I shouldn't despair. In a defense specific. In a defense context, yes. I think that it ultimately starts with reimagining the weapons we're building

and designing weapons differently so that they can be simpler and cheaper to build and they can be built by the industrial base that we have. So, I mean, you kind of look back at American history. You look back to the arsenal of democracy in World War II. we were not dreaming up like exotic military requirements and wishing that we had an industrial base that could build them. We were building the weapons that we knew we had an industrial base that could produce. So I think we need to actually get back to that, right? I feel like we've taken this holiday from history over the past generation where, you know,

we became complacent and we, you know, took a huge number of bad policy decisions where we kind of believe that the United States and China would have, you know, establish some type of, you know, a consortium and, you know, they'd be the builder and we'd be the buyer and, you know, they could provide all types of critical materials to our defense systems and it would be totally fine to say nothing of the broader American economy. You know, turns out that was a really bad set of decisions. It's taken 30 to 40 years, you know, of us, you know, doing this to ourselves to get us into the mess that we're currently in. So it's not going to be something that happens overnight. You just have to get started. And I think getting started, you know, from our foxhole at Anderil means, one, having a government that's actually

going to start buying the things that can be produced and produced in America in new and different ways with the industrial base that we have. I think that that's starting. So again, you know, credit goes to this administration, Congress who's providing them money to do it. And then when we start thinking about building out that infrastructure, right, it's going to be very different production infrastructure than what, you know, currently passes for in the traditional industrial base, where we are limited in so many ways by, you know, key shortfalls in supply chain and critical materials, you know, very exquisite workforce that we just don't have a lot of and it takes a long time to mature people into those types of roles. So, you know, our basic thesis is, okay, well, how do we,

how do we do we do well without all of that, right? How do we make, you know, weapons that are so simple to build that when we set up in Ohio, right, we have millions of people who can now join the defense workforce because they have, you know, a modicum of technical ability from commercial automotive or, you know, aerospace and defense or frankly like your higher-end performers at Home Depot, like the cruise missile that we talked about, the barracuda system, you basically can assemble it with about eight tools, all of which are available at your local hardware store. Like I measured in philosophy, I think that with like a decent amount of training over a couple of weeks, I could probably put a barracuda together.

But like, that's the bar we're setting, right? If like this idiot can do it, you know, we're bringing a larger amount of the American workforce back into defense because we made weapons that are actually possible for people to build. Like, you know, Rosie the Riveter was not, you know, someone who got 14 years to become a master welder, right? These were people that were coming into build systems that were purpose built to be simple, to be fast and cheap to build. So I think getting that sort of manufacturing capacity back for defense is not going to come

through trying to just build more versions of what we're. we've been building over the past several decades. We have to do that as best we can. That's a really gnarly problem. The real answer is we have to design new kinds of weapons, new kinds of military systems that have the kind of attributes that I'm describing that can be built faster, that can appeal to the broadest possible workforce. And frankly, you know, are consciously designed in a way that are reducing our exposure as much as humanly possible to these kinds of, you know, Chinese sources of supply or critical materials. And again, here, I think this is where, you know, we really do need the help of the U.S. government in terms of, you know, like I know it's a contentious term, but like industrial policy, you know, for things like germanium, which is a, you know, a byproduct of the zinc smelting operation that is essential to weaponry and is currently, you know, monopolized by Chinese production.

As a young man and a philosophy major, did you ever think you're going to mean the zinc smelting business? I couldn't have spelled germanyum. I'm not sure I still can. I don't even know if it's on the periodic table or if it's, you know, some man-made creation. You can't build weapons without it or at least not many of them. But again, you can limit your exposure to it. You can build weapons that require less germanium. You know, maybe there's a world where we build them without any germanium whatsoever. You know, and germanium is just an example, right? There are a series of other, you know, types of components in this regard.

But it's all just to say, like, it took us a long time to get ourselves into our current predicament. It's going to take time for us to get out. The only way to get going is just to get going and get going fast and get going at scale and with seriousness. And I think that's starting to happen. It's exciting to see the ways in which I think that's starting to happen. And, you know, in the coming years, I hope we really hit the gas. I was also a philosophy and a classics major as an undergraduate. And just this morning, I was asked to discuss Thucydides on national television.

Unfortunately, it was in the context of Graham Allison's Thucydides trap. But they told me that I couldn't make a living talking about ancient Greek thought on TV. And they were wrong, Chris. Again, you got to get into the classics for the money. That's right. I took an entire seminar in college where for the entire semester, all we did was read Thucydides. That's a great class. A little bit at a time and talk about all of it.

Who was the teacher for that? Devon Stoffer. Oh, right. Currently at the University of Texas. It was Kenyon College when I was there. A phenomenal professor. So shout out Devin St.offer if you're listening. I think he passed through St. John's at some point.

I could be wrong about that. I think he started there. Yeah, that's right. And then I think found his way back to. He was a Kenyan grad and found his way back to Kenya. There we go. So for all the young people out there listening, you two could be zinc smelters one day. You just got to study Thucydides very slowly and very carefully and deliberately.

I'm going to ask you about the budget and then I want to get to Andrew in the latest news about your your fundraising round. $1.5 trillion for a defense budget. Yeah. Seems like a lot of money. What's your take on the top line? I think any objective standard is a lot of money. What's your take on not just the top line, but as this debate proceeds, what are, I mean, in a way it's you sort of already addressed it. Like what kind of ask you like, how do you spend the money smartly?

But what are the high-level considerations for this budget that you think should be front of mind to the public who care about the defense of the nation? Yeah. There's a, I guess, a couple answers. I think one, the question that I've always had with defense and defense spending is not necessarily how much money we're spending, but what are we spending our money on? And just wanting to see, because like at the end of the day, budgets are choices to govern us to choose. And that's where, you know, the rubber meets the road is in, you know, how money gets allocated. So what we spend money on is how our priorities are reflected. So if we say that we value the kinds of things that we're talking about here, low-cost weapons

and AI-based air defense and these kinds of things, then we need to see the resources going to that. And credit to this administration, the budget request that they're putting forward has massive investments in these kinds of technology areas, these kinds of new programs, autonomous weapons and other things. The second answer to your question is it all comes down to. to whether they actually get the money that they're requesting. And, you know, that's where, again, just as a long-suffering former congressional staffer

who has, you know, way more, you know, intimate familiarity with Byzantine ways of how, you know, things get done up there, you know, like I've got a fair amount of concern that that amount of money is actually going to make it through the legislative process and into the hands of the Pentagon. Because ultimately what they're, you know, at least what I'm hearing as of late is, you know, They're going to try to run this through a reconciliation process, which is a very complicated legislative maneuver. They're going to try to do it at the very end of the year, probably on the other side of a midterm election, which, you know, I stopped making predictions about American politics a long time ago, but, you know, it looks like it could go a bad way for Republicans. So, you know, on the back end of that with like two holidays before, you know, the Congress pieces out and goes home, like how much confidence do we have that we're going to pull this kind of.

very complicated legislative maneuver off and allocate an additional $350 billion to defense on top of the request that they've made. I hope that it works. I mean, I hope that maybe they change the strategy and pull the timeline to the left to increase the confidence that we can do this. But I think, you know, to your question of what people should be paying attention to and concerned about is, you know, for the people out there who believe we need to be spending more on defense, you know, who believe that is an actual percentage of our GDP. We're not even close to what our historical average has been. We're well below it. They should be concerned about the likelihood or lack thereof that this money actually does make it through. And then the deeper question, regardless of how much the top line ends up being, is, you know, is money going to these kinds of new technological areas, these new programs and capabilities?

Or are we continuing to plow all the money back into the old legacy programs that, you know, that we're talking about here? And, you know, in the event, God forbid, that the budget doesn't show up if they don't get the amount of money. And they do have to start making the hard choices of, you know, what are we not going to invest in? You know, what I've seen historically is every time the Pentagon has been faced with that choice, you know, they line up all the senior citizens and they eat first. And then all the new folks, you know, the new technologies, the folks focused on the future, you know, it turns out there's no food left. And it's like, well, maybe next year is going to be your year. I hope that that doesn't happen this year. I mean, I'm bullish that the leadership understands the importance of these kind of new

technology areas that they're talking about and focusing on investing in. And if they actually have to start making some hard resource choices, I hope they continue to prioritize and fight for money for those new capabilities rather than, you know, allowing Congress or, you know, they themselves allowing the bureaucracy just to plow money, you know, back into our kind of old legacy industrial base. I want to ask you about this round of funding, Series H, which values Anderil at $61 billion. $61 billion. Congrats on that.

It's a lot of money. It's not one and a half trillion, but it's a lot. On its way, Chris. On its way. One can hope. Here's something. So, you know, we made the point that on some of these munitions questions, if we went back 10 years, people in the know kind of already knew this stuff. I feel like if we went back 10 years and told people that there's going to be a brand new defense company in 2026 that's doing a fundraising round that values it at 61 billion.

million dollars. And by the way, it's not the only one. There's other exciting defense, tech companies, just defense companies that are new, this would have blown people's mind. The notion that for investment, that this was a space where investors should be interested in planning, I mean, this is genuinely new under the sun in the American economy. What's happened? What's the investment environment like? What's it like talking to investors who have never put a dollar into anything like this before? Yeah. So, I mean, when you go back 10 years or in the case of Anderil, we were, you know, nine years, you know, nine years in. Look, when the company was founded, I mean, I wasn't there on day one, but, you know, I was employee 40 or something. So I've been

along for the journey. Look, people thought we were dumb or evil or some combination of both for wanting to do this, right? Dumb because it's like there's no way that you're going to make a business out of building weapons and selling them to the government. And to the extent that you think that's a good idea, it's probably because you're evil. And, you know, like that was the prevailing sentiment. I think, you know, huge credit to the founding team of Andrel. You know, they really were, you know, kind of one of the first to kind of arrive at this and try to do this. And a huge credit to those early investors who understood the importance of this, the importance of the mission, understood the need for it and understood that for us, our journey was just going

to be very different than probably every one of their other investments that's doing work in the commercial economy. You know, it's very important. It's very one of the business. It's, It's very resource intensive. It's very time intensive. We have a very strange customer in the United States government. The funding for the budget doesn't always show up on the first day of the fiscal year. Politics change. I mean, we've gone through the first Trump administration to the Biden administration to

now the Trump administration. And we've done incredibly well because we've always believed from day one that we have to build enduring bipartisan support for what we're seeking to build. And we plan to be around for a really long time. So, you know, I think we got a lot of those big things right. And I think that what we've been able to do, you know, frankly, I think through our success is prove that it works, right? Prove that you can actually build a business doing this. Prove that you can attract top talent who not just are willing to come in, but are excited to come in because they care about the mission and they believe that these are the hardest of the hard problems.

and that's what they became engineers to, you know, to get after in the first place. And I think, you know, that has led to a lot of the, you know, kind of desire for more people to get into this space, to found their own companies, you know, investors wanting to, you know, help those companies get off the ground and, you know, build themselves up. I think that's great. Like if anything, right now, we're probably on the other side where you've now got, you know, a surplus of money going in and, you know, probably more companies that are going, you know, or be able. to kind of make it through at the end of the day. So it starts to look more like a venture category, right, where you know, you have a lot of investment going in. You're kind of chasing the high performers. Not everybody's going to make it to the end of the video game, but that's okay. That's what venture capitalism is all about. And for once, we can actually have this in defense,

you know, which for the most of our, you know, kind of recent historical experience is like the land that capitalism forgot. So I think this is all to the good. It's wild to your point to imagine even five years ago that we'd be where we are, let alone 10 years ago where this was mostly unimaginable. And, you know, I think in many respects, the best is yet to come. You know, like we have earned our way to where we are, right? We're not getting a crazy valuation because, you know, somehow we can trick people into giving us money and, you know, build a hype machine. I mean, it's all backed up by performance and, you know, major wins on major programs and, you know, billions and billions and billions of dollars of revenue that we're generally.

generating and the company and all of the growth. So, you know, we're taking on $5 billion, and we're going to plow that into the blast furnace of, you know, Andrew's growth engine. And, you know, we're going to stand up additional manufacturing infrastructure. We're going to grow the teams. You know, we're going to build wild new capabilities, you know, and this is exactly what, you know, American investment in American capitalism defense is supposed to look like. So, you know, I think it's, it's exciting to see the current government, um, actually start talking about this as an important sort of development, right? And starting to say to, you know, the legacy defense companies, you need to be doing this kind of stuff too, right? You need to

be funding your own capital expenditures. You need to be investing in your own research and development. And you need to be accountable for what you're delivering. And we're not going to pay you until you deliver. Like, crazy ideas. Like, that's been our journey since day one. Like, we've had to take the risk. We've had to lean into these problems and make these. investments and build things in advance of requirements and advance of contracts and, you know, build factories to spec on our own dime because we had to prove to the government that we had the ability to deliver, you know, and produce at scale, despite the fact that we hadn't historically done that. So it's been a massively risky venture and it's taken all kinds of interesting

twists and turns over the past nine years, but, you know, we believe we're in an incredibly good position. Future is bright. We're incredibly excited. And, you know, I think the thing that's really exciting is, you know, when in the early days of Andrel, right, I mean, we always believed that one of the success, like the broader success criteria of the company is not just that, you know, we would do well and we would help to transform defense. But that, you know, an additional success story, putting some more points on the board, would begin to sort of create the incentives for this kind of defense technology ecosystem to emerge, to draw top talent back in and investment back in. And, you know, I think that's happening. I certainly wouldn't claim credit for it,

but I do think we've contributed to it. And I think that it's great for America and very exciting to see. Chris Burroughs, president and chief strategy officer of Andrew, your book, the kill chain really does hold up. People should, and still in print. You can still find it in paperback. You can get it in hardback. You can get it in paperback. You can even buy it on CD-ROM apparently on Amazon. Those of you rock and CD players. And if you listen to it on an audio book, I apologize in advance because, like, I had COVID when I record it. It's you. It's your voice.

Oh, it's my voice. And it is very slow and very low because I couldn't get through a single sentence or two without, like, hacking myself to death. So, yeah, that was a really fun experience over the course of two days. So, yeah, you want to hit it at like 1.4x, 1.5X speed. Good advice. Well, I hope you come back sometime. And next time we'll just talk to cities. Always glad to be here.

We'll talk to cities. and we'll see what your retention is on that course of the time. But these great things, you hang on to them. He only teaches two things, that the strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must, and that America needs to accommodate China. That's what I'm told. Those are his two teachings. There's nothing else to see.

Yeah. All right. Chris, thank you so much. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. Thank you guys. One of those media strategy people clicking through slides, scrolling spreadsheets. Yes? Good. This is for you. Because on Spotify, there's an audience that's different. Locked in. Loyal, invested. They're called fans. Fans don't just listen to music. They feel seen by it, like it belongs to them. So when your brand shows up on Spotify, that's who you're talking to. And you're right next to artists like me, Lizzo. So, are you ready to talk to fans? Spotify advertising. You're among fans.