Anduril’s Chris Brose on Fighting The Next War

- Christian Bros is Chief Strategy officer of Anil Industries and author of the Kill Chain Defending America in the Future of High Tech Warfare. Chris, there can't have been many newspaper op-eds that have been more timely than your one of the 24th of February of this year entitled America Needs a lot More Weapons Considering that Epic Fury broke out literally four days later proving pretty much everything that you wrote in that, in that piece, in that piece, you of course kicked off with the fact that President Trump is planning to request $1.5 trillion for defense. But you also pointed out that in a conflict with China, the US would run out of critical munitions in days. How can those two things be both, both happen. I mean, it seems extraordinary that that amount of money can be spent on defense, and yet America wouldn't have enough to fight a major war for longer than a few days with regard to munitions.

- Yeah, it, look, it's, it's one of these things that you look back on and say, you know, I wish I hadn't been right. But, you know, I think at the same time, for anybody paying attention to this problem, you know, it's, it's been obvious for a long time. You know, and I, I kind of make mention in the piece going all the way back to, you know, a decade or more ago when I was working in the Senate Armed Services Committee for, for Senator McCain and the majority there, the problem was apparent then, and I think part of the answer to your question is that historically the Department of Defense and multiple administrations of both parties have shortchanged investments in weapons. They've always looked at it as a quote unquote bill payer for other things. And especially when you end up in periods of time where the defense budget is not flush with cash, where there are fiscal trade-offs that have to be made. I mean, there are always fiscal trade-offs that have to be made. But if you go back a decade ago when you're in the middle of budget control act and sequestration and all of these things, you remember, well, I think multiple senior leaders saw munitions as a place where they could afford to cut and take risk in order to press more money into, you know, ships and aircraft and sort of larger platforms that take longer to build. And the assumption at the time was, you know, if we ever get into a conflict, you know, we can build weapons really fast. And you know, my belief at the time was that's a lot of nonsense. And I think, unfortunately, we've now run that social science experiment in Ukraine and Iran and other places, and we've seen that it's as nonsensical as it seemed at the time. I think the bigger problem is that it's the, it's the character of the weapons that we are investing in, you know, most of these systems that Americans now know by name, Patriot and Tomahawk, and, you know, standard missile three and six and other things. I mean, these are weapons in many cases that are as old, if not older than I am. And I know we're recording on audio, but I assure your listeners, I'm very old now. I mean, these are

- Decades old. I'm, I I I look old enough to be your father and I recognize most of these things, Frank,

- Carry on. Right? So, and, and the problem is that these weapons were never designed to be mass producible in the first place. You know, if you, if you go back to, you know how we used to do this in the 20th century for much of the 20th century before we had this kind of great consolidation of defense industry in the 1990s here in the United States, we oftentimes had multiple providers of different classes of weapons. We actually had some competition and sort of multi-sourcing inside of these, you know, kind of weapons lines. Well, for the past several decades, we haven't done that. We've had one provider of a particular weapon, and we've just gone back to that one provider. And, and that weapon was designed with the assumption, you know, which was kind of, you know, kind of very apparent in the 1990s. And, and for, for a long time thereafter that America was not going to find itself in long protracted conflicts that we had technological superiority. If we were going to have to wage war, we weren't gonna shoot a lot of weapons, we're not gonna have to replenish a lot of weapons and then do this as a function of time, not for days or weeks, but for months and years, which I would argue is, is an assumption that is historically anomalous in the context of American history. Every war we have fought, to some extent has been a war of attrition and production and loss and regeneration. But for the past several decades, we've sort of, you know, tricked ourselves into believing that we are going to fight very short wars. We're not gonna have to have a lot of industrial production. So we designed weapons accordingly. And the weapons we have are very difficult to produce. They're very expensive, and we don't have a lot of them. And it turns out that when you shoot a lot of them and lose a lot of them, you don't get them back very quickly. So it's a, a very long answer to your question, but I think the short version is we have not designed weapons for mass production, and we have not sort of put ourselves on a war footing mentality where we're going to need industry to be able to produce an order of magnitude more of these weapons than for the past few decades we've assumed we could have.

- And also in your article you say that quote, increased spending hasn't led to proportionate increases in production. And in particular, you point out the J-A-S-S-M, the joint air to surface standoff munition, which from fiscal year 2016 to 26, although procurement spending doubled for that, the actual production only increased by 14%. So what's going on here is the, is the American taxpayer getting value for money?

- Look, the, the jazz, and I hate to acronyms, but for the sake of, you know, not, not destroying your listeners, I will just keep using acronyms. You know, JA is a dude and

- Also the - M six, it's a air launch cruise miss about the

- SM six as well.

- Quite interesting. S six, standard missile six is a ship launched, you know, you know, anti anti-missile, you know, capability. So it's a air defense weapon that gets loaded vertically into our surface combatants. You know, it, and it's not, you know, as I tried to say in the article, it's not to pick on, you know, this weapon or that weapon. I think it's a problem that is rife across our munitions inventory. And, you know, I could call out Tomahawk, I could call out Patriot, I could, I could point to other weapons that, again, by now many Americans know by name. And I think that the problem is the same. And you look at the procurement spending, which as I mentioned, doubled, but that doesn't also include the cost of, you know, research and development and testing and evaluation money that was spent over that same period of time, all born by the taxpayer, not born by industry that isn't factored into the overall price per round. So when you kind of look at the fully amortized cost, the, the story's actually worse in terms of the money that we're putting in and the production increases, the marginal, minimal productional production increases were getting out. So you can, you can ask the question why is this, and, and this is what I tried to kind of articulate in the article, is that, you know, as I was saying a moment ago, these weapons are not designed for mass production. So they're overly complicated. They're full of very exquisite, very bespoke in some cases, obsolete components and pieces of technology. The way that they're manufactured is almost artisanal. We have a workforce that is, you know, exquisitely trained, highly specialized, which, you know, as a, as a function does not grow very well. It takes a lot of time to kind of train these people and, and get these people in a position to do this work, which again, is highly manual, highly time intensive, and none of these processes scale, right? And these processes are still very reminiscent of a period of time before a lot of the advances we've seen in modern manufacturing, you know, and, and people wanna focus on Chinese industrial capacity, and that's all fine. But there's also been a revolution in manufacturing here in the United States that has not in any way, shape or form kind of affected the way we build weapons or design weapons. So, you know, the answer to your question is no. Like the, the taxpayer is not getting a great return on investment here. Now, these weapons are amazing, and I think, you know, the conclusion that it leads me to is not that we should stop building and buying these weapons, we actually need to build and buy more of them. It's that we are never going to have the weapons inventory we need only from these types of weapons. We have to have new weapons that are, that are designed now in the year 2026 for mass production and move to what, you know, a lot of defense planners refer to as a high low mix of weapons. So you have the high end capabilities like your jas, like your standard missiles and your tomahawks, which are very expensive. They do amazing things. You're never gonna have very many of them. And you're going to be very risk kind of averse about when you shoot those weapons just because, you know, once, once you've shot them, they're gone and it's really hard to replace them. At the same time, I think we need to compliment that high-end inventory with a very large volume of lower end weapons that are, you know, that almost have the opposite attributes, right? That are much cheaper, much simpler by design, much easier to mass produce where you can afford to have volume, you can shoot volume, you can fire these weapons with less regret because you know, you can build them back relatively quickly. And then you get into what I think is a very virtuous, you know, kind of opportunity of being able to pair smaller numbers of high-end weapons with larger numbers of low-end weapons. And those kind of blended salvos, if you could call them, that end up actually being more effective and lower price than the way we would do it if all we were shooting was lots of high-end weapons. As we've seen now, you know, in, in a few weeks of, of operations in Epic fury,

- You must get a bit of dejavu because you've been saying this for 10 years plus, haven't you? Essentially, your book, the Kill Chain, which was published some time ago now, what was it, two, 2017 or so?

- It was 2000. It came out in 2020. And I remember that sadly because right as it was coming out, the world was going into global quarantine. So my, my book tour got abbreviated real fast and I mostly did it over Zoom outta my bedroom, which, you know, honestly, logistically wasn't a bad thing.

- The, and, and in it you quote Senator John McCain, who you work for saying in 2017, that was the reason the date stuck who I might, yes, future generations of Americans are going to look back at us and they're going to ask how we let this happen and why we didn't do more about it when we had the chance. Talking about, about defense now, when you mentioned military planning there and you were the director of the, of the staff of the Citizens and Armed Services Committee, do you think that there's something wrong with the, with the setup, with the military planning setup? Is there any way that you could do anything differently? I don't know, constitutionally, to actually get a decision making process that's more likely to decide to make these simpler, faster, cheaper weapons?

- Yeah, I, and I think we're, we're starting to see this changing. And I think a, a lot of what I try to point out in the book, and, and certainly a lot of what I've been saying in the years since it's come out, is there are always process improvements. There are always things we can do to make processes and planning better. And I think in Washington, we tend to over index on the process improvements as the, as the real answer to our problems. And I think that in my experience, the, the problems and the solutions are actually way upstream of that. And it has to do with, you know, things that I think you're very familiar of, which is, it's more sort of questions of imagination, right? It's questions of senior leaders, understanding where they think future trends are going, and making different kinds of bets, and being willing to disrupt processes that by their very nature, I think are designed to kind of move current processes or, or sort of current decisions through the system. And you know, what you, what you get are, you know, you, you get sort of more predictability, you know, less time involvement of senior leaders, but you also end up with, you know, the risk of kind of path dependence, right? Where you keep fighting the last war, you keep, you know, kind of building the same things, you keep building better versions of old things. And it really does take, and I think, you know, again, any student of history sort of sees this, right? The great innovations and disruptions in military technology are often driven through, you know, kind of battlefield experimentation or, you know, kind of operational experimentation. But it always involves senior leaders who are willing and able to sort of imagine where future trends are going and force their institutions to go there. So, you know, when I look at the United States and, and my, my guess is, you know, a lot of, a lot of allies and partners in the world have problems that sort of rhyme with what I'm about to say. You know, we, we have a, a, a process that that doesn't always empower senior leaders to make these kinds of decisions, you know, that you, you end up in, in sort of problems where the supply and demand of military power, you know, ends up sort of very bifurcated. You don't have senior leaders who are oftentimes kind of put in their positions with, you know, kind of knowledge and, and sort of a belief in where they have to go and a clear vision of where they want to take their organization. And there are exceptions to that, that we can point to, but I think the, like the bigger issue when it comes to this kind of question of, you know, shifting the balance of the types of systems that we're buying, you know, shifting toward larger numbers of lower cost weapons, shifting toward more unmanned and autonomous systems, this is something that we absolutely can do. We have the money to do it. We have the technology to do it. We're seeing all of the operational need to do it. What it really requires, I think, more than any kind of planning or process improvement is senior leaders who are prepared to grab specific ideas, specific programs and drag them through the system and, and disrupt that process and do the things that I think only senior leaders have the authority and the inclination to do. Right? I don't want, you know, unelected bureaucrats making massively risky decisions and experimenting with things. I want that done by Senate confirmed officials. I want that done by elected officials. And I think the same is true in, you know, kind of other, other democratic societies. It's more an issue of having those people in a position where they can actually understand what needs to be done and drive those kinds of things through the system, which is something that I think they only uniquely have the authority and the inclination to do.

- What do you think of the future trends that elected officials will learn from Epic Fury?

- I, I think in, in many cases, it's the same lessons that we've been learning from all of these recent conflicts. And, you know, again, you know, I I I, I love the opportunity to always kind of go back and, and look at history. My dad is a historian, is a historian, you know, studied, you know, 19th and 20th century Europe with a real focus on military technology. And, you know, maybe a lot of this rubbed off on me. What's interesting is when you go back and look at the changes in military technology that were occurring in the latter half of the 19th century, all of those changes were, were evident before they arrived on the battlefields of 1914 and World War I for decades. They were apparent, arguably going all the way back to the American Civil War. And I think the same is true now, right? Like the lessons that we're learning in Epic Fury are the same lessons that we should have been learning in the war in Ukraine are the same lessons that we should have been learning in frankly, many of the disruptions that were happening under the radar in the Middle East, you know, in conflicts in Iraq and Syria and Yemen, and then obviously going all the way back to, you know, the, the Nagorno karbach conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan and what was that, 20 19, 20 20, 20 19, you know, the, the, the need to have mass, you know, the fact that conflict is likely going to be protracted, that we are going to take a lot of losses, we're going to have to replace a lot of capability, leads you to, I think, a set of decisions around the nature of the character of military power that you're building and fielding. You want those systems to be a treatable, right? Things that you're willing and able to lose and build back, which leads you toward lower cost systems, more unmanned and autonomous systems, you know, the software defined nature of all of these things that have to be able to work together. You know, all of these to me are the, are the lessons that I think we need to be taking away. But again, I think at the same time we shouldn't overlearn or over index those lessons, right? Like the war in Ukraine did not teach us that tanks are obsolete. Arguably it taught us that the Russians are really bad at using tanks and really bad at running a war when you've given them 24 hours to, you know, plan their logistics. You know, so I I I just think we, we need to kind of be nuanced in the lessons that we're learning here, recognizing that the answer is not gonna be throughout all the old stuff and embrace all the new stuff. You know, we definitely need to be embracing the new stuff a lot faster and a lot more at scale than we have been. And I'm, I'm, I'm like actually cautiously optimistic that we're starting to see that happening in the United States, but at the same time, we have to balance our investments with, you know, proven exquisite capabilities, high-end capabilities that are still going to provide massive military advantage for the United States for our friends and allies. Not throw the baby out with the bathwater. But, you know, when you kind of look at the, the money that is being spent in the Department of War right now, you know, including when we see a one and a half trillion dollars sort of budget request all in come forward, the preponderance of that money is still going toward legacy systems, the sustainment of old things, people, personnel costs, you know, it's still a relatively small amount of money, you know, probably, you know, single digit percentages if not less, that's going to, you know, a lot of these newer capabilities that I think are going to be very important for the future.

- Is there a political reason behind that? Is this one always hears about pork barrel politics and senators and, and congressmen ensuring that, that their constituents are employed in large numbers in certain places and so on, which isn't necessarily what the, what the war fighting capacity of the United States needs. Do. Have you come across that in your time in the Senate Armed Services Committee?

- I am painfully familiar with that problem, and, you know, look, I mean, I, there are many things that I did in government that I'm very happy and proud of. There are many things that I had to do because that's what government service requires. And, you know, supporting members who wanted to, to take a lot of those actions and, you know, keep legacy systems alive and keep, you know, kind of legacy bases and other things kind of doing the things that they've always been doing. Yeah. Like very, very familiar. But what I would also say is I think what I came to appreciate in that is oftentimes we, we, we kind of point or cast blame in the wrong places and we sort of look at it in a bit of an unfair light. And what I mean by that is, you know, members of Congress are, are many things, but they're not idiots. And, you know, I think that a lot of the problem that we see with, you know, if you just take an example of, of sort of retiring some legacy aircraft or you know, some legacy military system, you have a, you know, example of a military service that wants to move out of some old thing in order to free up money to, to move into some new thing. And a lot of times what happens is the, you know, the, the, the given part of the Pentagon or the, the office of the Secretary of Defense or Secretary of War will come up and say, look, we want to completely get rid of this old thing. We want to kill it right now, but trust us, we're gonna put all this money into this new thing and this new thing is gonna arrive in, you know, a few years and it will replace this old thing that we're getting rid of today. And again, members of Congress are not stupid. And you know, I actually think that, you know, there's a fair claim to be made that, you know, what they say is, look, I I'm not gonna take a tool away from war fighters who, who are using it and needing it today if I can't put a, a new and better tool in their hands right now. And I think a lot of the problem that we have with the political unwillingness to get rid of old things isn't sort of explained by, you know, congress or, you know, the military, industrial, you know, complex wanting to hang to old things. It is the inability of the government and industry to generate new things such that we can actually make the trade off between new and old, see the value of the new and, and begin to shift resources from the old and into the new. And, you know, unless the new things show up faster and in greater numbers, I think we're always going to be bedeviled by that problem. And I think a lot of what, you know, certainly what I tried to do when I was in government, and certainly what I've been trying to do now that I'm an industry, albeit a very different kind of defense industry, is solve for that problem, is to get the new capabilities out faster and into the hands of operators faster so that you can begin to make an informed decision about, you know, divesting from old things in order to shift resources into new things. That being said, it will be a process, right? And, and I think this is why the importance of increased defense spending is something to concentrate on, right? As we're making this transition from old to new, I do think we're going to have to have increased resources to be doing some degree of both at the same time, to give the new an opportunity to prove itself. Because my experience is whenever resources are scarce, whenever trade-offs have to get made, it's not the old stuff that loses out, it's the new stuff, right? We always eat our seed corn, you know, it's the new capabilities and the new technologies that are always last to the bowl. And we have to have some resources to bring that stuff through and show the value and the benefit of it. Or we're forever going to be pouring resources into old capacity.

- And when we look at America's prime rival China and the way it can harness entire industries for, for defense, it can, it can call on anyone it likes to do anything it wants in the whole country. Whereas we are depending essentially on private enterprise and, and privately owned companies and so on to, to do that. Are we, I dunno, are we sort of fighting with one arm tied behind our backs really compared to, to our, our main opponent?

- I, not necessarily. I I think that in, in many cases, when you look at what the Chinese are doing with technology development, military technology, as well as other technology, there's in, in their own unique way, there's actually a, a remarkable amount of like ruthless and cutthroat competition that they allow to happen, right? Which to me is very reminiscent of the way the US government ran these kinds of large technology endeavors back in the Cold War in the early Cold War, right? When we were trying to develop intercontinental ballistic missiles and, you know, go to space and, and, and do all these other very large and important technological feats. You know, we actually ran multiple programs, we competed those programs against each other, we competed different companies against one another. And through that process of ruthless competition, like a crazy thing happened, things got better faster. And, and then when you started to really prove it out, you know, you, you, you picked a winner and you went into production and, and I think like inside of their own obviously very status system, there is a degree to which they're actually doing, I would argue many of the things that America did when it was serious back in the 20th century. And then when they decide on a winner, they anoint that winner and they go to scale with the, you know, massive force of the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese state behind it. And I think that when, when I look at our system, part of the problem that I see is, you know, we have a, we have a Pentagon planning process that is, that is communist in its nature and it, it was sort of designed that way and you can go back and talk about the history of sort of how and why that happened, which I'm sure you're very familiar with. But you know, my basic criticism of our kind of, you know, our, our planning process is that it looks a lot, a lot like China at its worst and not enough, like America at its best. We need to get more of this kind of competition and sort of ruthless entrepreneurial spirit into these types of military programs where we can have, you know, different parts of government and then certainly different parts of defense industry just ruthlessly competing against one another to produce the best capability. And then once we've decided that we've got a winner, take it to scale produce very quickly, show that there's a real benefit to being the best. But, but don't do it forever, right? Don't do what we've been doing for the past several decades where, you know, it's almost like, you know, getting tenure at a university, like once you have it, it's yours forever. And once, you know, once you win a military program, it's like yours and, you know, you could murder somebody in the street and they'll never take it away from you. I think we have to be recomp competing these things more often to again, push competition into these parts of the defense program where we can afford to have it where there's now, you know, huge amounts of new industry and, and new private capital investment that's going to make these technologies and make them better. And I think that unless we create, you know, kind of a greater opening for entrepreneurialism and capitalism and dynamism and really unlock what I think is absolutely the superpower of the United States of America and our private industry and our capital markets and the talent of our people, then I think we're basically going to be trying to play a bad version of the Chinese game badly rather than actually fighting with, you know, the, the real entrepreneurial spirit of the American people in American society.

- What are the exciting new areas that, that we should be looking at? The, you've written about satellites being blinded by lasers and high energy jams and, and these really advanced things. What are the kind of big areas that you think are going to really move the dial on future battlefields?

- Yeah, it's, there's, there's opportunity all over the place and I think this is why I'm, I'm so excited. Yeah, I'll give you a couple of examples of things that we're just working on at Andel, which, you know, putting aside the capability, I think it also shows the way in which, you know, we others are going about these problems, which itself I think is very exciting. You know, we're, we're working an effort for the United States Air Force called the Collaborative Combat Aircraft, which is a fancy way of saying like a big robotic fighter jet. So a fully autonomous combat aircraft that if you looked at it, you know, it looks very reminiscent to, you know, fighter aircraft that everybody is familiar with. The big difference being, there's no pilot in it. The thing operates fully autonomously, not just in the ability to go out and fly missions, but the ability to actually fight those missions to be able to make sensor of the sensors and mission systems that are on that aircraft to be able to identify targets in the environment to take action against those targets if directed by human beings. So a fully, you know, obviously kind of like partially, you know, autonomous, but, but certainly the technology enables fully autonomous weapon system. We, we basically went through a competitive process, we were selected on that and we went from a design of the system to first flight in 556 days, which sounds like a lot of time, but you know, to get to a fully autonomous robotic fighter jet is lights speed, which again, is very reminiscent of the way we used to do this back in the 20th century when we were more serious. At the same time, we are standing up a large scale production facility to build this, you know, this this fighter aircraft at rate in Columbus, Ohio. You know, we announced that we were doing this in January of last year. We opened the doors, you know, in the first quarter of this year and literally announced this week that we're going into production for this robotic fighter jet. So as, as amazing as this capability is, right, the ability to have hundreds and hundreds of autonomous fighter jets that can operate together with manned fighter aircraft, right? That can fly as, you know, so-called loyal wingman or, or collaborative teammates with your F 30 fives or your F 20 twos or what have you, to be able to move out forward of those manned aircraft and do you know, risky or dangerous things that you don't necessarily wanna have to risk a human life in a very expensive airplane to do, to be able to carry more sensors and weapons, you know, into the operational environment. Again, to get mass back on our side in a way that we're never gonna be able to do if we're doing it only with these very exquisite, very expensive systems that we've relied upon for a very long time. This is an enormous and exciting opportunity. And again, the ability to go from literally two years ago, having a design to now to where we are today, going into production and being able to do this at rate, if the resources and the political will is there, I would argue as, as exciting as that is, you know, I, I could spend the rest of the day explaining that there are, you know, two or three dozen other types of programs where you could do the exact same thing, right? Build these kinds of very high-end, albeit low cost, very autonomous military vehicles and platforms that can do a range of different missions together with the man force that we have. And I think that is a massive innovation that when we talk about these kind of lofty goals of how do we, how do we double defense production in the United States by the end of this decade? This is how we do it, right? It's not by just throwing more money at the industrial base and the programs that we have. It's by starting these kinds of new programs, bringing in new companies that, you know, are hungry to do it, that are well capitalized to do it, that have leading technology and talent to do it. That's, I think how we, how we, how we get ourselves in a position this decade where we can restore deterrence and start pushing, you know, the timelines that everybody is worried about with China and Taiwan and, and other kind of world threats off to the right rather than have them continue to creep to the left and look like things that we might have to deal with in the very near term.

- That's fascinating about the robotic fighter jet. How, how worried were you when you saw that the Iranians were able to shoot down an F 15 E during this latest war?

- I I mean, I was worried, but I also wasn't surprised. I mean, I, I think that, you know, again, I think it's, it's illustrative to just kind of realize how fast these things are changing. You know, when I was back in government, and this was, you know, call it 10 years ago, everybody used to refer to the Middle East as quote unquote a permissive environment, which is a fancy way of saying we can fly airplanes around, there's not much risk. We can, you know, steam our ships through the, you know, through the strait, through the canals, through other places, and they're not at an enormous amount of risk. And I think what we've seen over the past 10 years is that has been completely turned on its head. You know, we now have, you know, a strait that's being closed by, you know, one way attack drones, suicide boats, you know, you know, coastal cruise missiles. You know, we're seeing, you know, certainly unmanned aircraft like predator and reaper drones being shot down in very large numbers. And we're certainly seeing man fighter aircraft coming under the same kind of threat. And again, this is not from a high-end adversary, right? I mean, you know, everybody wants to talk about, you know, epic fury as it is some, you know, harbinger of like the future AI war to come. Look, my view of this is it looks a lot more like shock and awe Iraq 2003 edition than it does, you know, some sort of future conflict. I think what's different is that you've seen an enormous amount of innovation inside of the, you know, inside of Iran, you know, and the proliferation of those capabilities to the Houthis and others in the region, the, you know, Lebanese Hezbollah who are now also using them. Now, I think the, the good news is a lot of that capacity has been degraded through the few weeks of military operations that the United States and Israel have conducted. I think the question will be how quickly can the Iranians grow it back? And I think that is the exactly the kind of, you know, challenge that I think we're talking about here, which is, you know, if you're focusing on a military power that is producible, that is low cost, that is replenishable, they will be able to grow it back relatively quickly. And that's something that I think is deeply worrisome and frankly things that we should be taking lessons from. Right? I think there's been a lot of, you know, coverage of this, you know, case where the United States basically reverse engineered one of the Iranian sheed drones and sort of built it and, and sort of are shooting it back. It's like, cool, that's a great victory of, you know, Iranian innovation and American copying. What I would like to see is us actually taking the lessons that we've seen on the Iranian battlefield, on the Ukrainian battlefield and, and building programs for the United States military for our allied and, and, and sort of partnered militaries that look like the robotic fighter jets that look like, you know, these, these larger robotic submarines that we're building that look like, you know, lower cost weapons that are going to do things that, you know, these she head drones cannot, but nonetheless have the same attributes and principles that I think is, is the real opportunity here. And you know, I I hope that we're learning those lessons. I I am confident that we are, it's just a question of how quickly and, and how much at scale

- Are there weapons that could stop the Iranians from dominating the strait of Horus?

- You know, look, that's, that's an area where I, I'm not as informed as I used to be, right? When I was consuming government intelligence. You know, I, I don't know exactly all of the, you know, kind of approaches that we might take to go at that. I do think that there are, you know, there, there are certain means by which the Iranians are using, which I think we've been seeking to target and, and, and to treat. I don't know if, you know, had we kind of, you know, continued to go that much further, you know, would we have been able to completely eliminate it, kind of reopen the straight by force. But I definitely think one of the lessons that we're going to have to take from this, and, and again, this is something that, you know, we've been as a, as a company at Andel very involved in is, is all of the defensive measures that are going to have to be put in place to counter the proliferation of, you know, large scale, low cost, very precise autonomous weaponry, the likes of which we are seeing coming out of Iran and, and, and certainly other places. So, you know, we talk about counter drone and that's certainly an area that, that, that Andel has been deeply involved in to include through the operations of Epic Fury. We're also going to have to think about how to do that in a maritime environment, how we're gonna defend not just from aerial drones, but from surface unmanned surface vessels and unmanned underwater vessels. Really thinking about this as, you know, kind of multi-domain force protection against large con, you know, large quantities of, of low cost weaponry, which is not something that we've traditionally done. You know, we think about defending our capital ships from, you know, small numbers of, of inbound weapons, and we have the kind of weapons magazine to do that. But when you're under a constant daily yearly barrage of these types of, you know, low cost at treatable systems, you're just gonna have to solve that problem differently. And there too, I think it's a huge opportunity to innovate, you know, at the level of, of software and data integration and certainly at the level of autonomy and, and mass production. I think this is something that, you know, certainly we're really kind of leading an effort on here in Andel, but I think it's a, it's a massive opportunity. It's a massive challenge that we're gonna have to solve of, you know, how do we defend ourselves against this new emerging kind of future of warfare rather than just be, you know, constantly on the receiving end of it and being out moved by an adversary that is, has kind of taken that step.

- You've mentioned friends and allies a couple of times, and obviously the Mari maritime environment here in Britain, a lot of us are feeling utterly humiliated by the way the Royal Navy was unable to even protect our own bases, let alone help anyone else. Is it disappointing from the American military point of view that, that, that Britain hasn't been stepping up with regard to, to defense spending obviously with regards to the Royal Navy and then also our refusal to allow you to use the air bases for the initial assault?

- Yeah, I I, I'm reluctant to get into the politics of it, which, you know, are, are complicated and, and, and I totally understand. I mean, obviously as an American, you know, I, you know, I, I'd always love to see, you know, as much allied support as we possibly can get for the kinds of things that we're seeking to do. And in much the same way, you know, I would, I would hope that if the shoe were on the other foot and an ally were in need saying, you know, we need help. That, that's something that America would arise to the occasion on. And I think this is just what is special about the special relationship. It is what makes, you know, an alliance and alliance is that it's beyond transactional. You know, it's beyond, Hey, if you do this, I'll do that. That it always has to be a quid pro quo that I think that it's important that we do these things because we inherently believe in the value of our alliance and, and, and seeing our allies be strong and be successful. And I think that is true for the United States. I think it is in our interest to have a strong Europe and a strong United Kingdom. And you know, I would argue that if, you know, if, if our allies were in need, even if there's no direct kind of transactional material benefit that comes from us, you know, I think that we rise to the occasion because our allies need help. And the hope would be that, you know, if and when the shoe on the other foot they reciprocate, I, I think the, the, the bigger answer to your question is there's, look, there's obviously a lot that's changing in Europe, and I think that that's been changing for a very long time. And I think that, you know, the United Kingdom is, is seeing those changes too, right? The, there, there is talk of future defense spending in the uk. I know the current budget challenges are very real. My hope is that there will be political will after we get through kind of the, the very immediate pain to, to actually see defense spending increase. I think the big question for the UK and for Europe, and frankly the same is true for the United States, is if you're able to get an increase in defense spending, it's not an end in itself. The question is what are you spending that money on? And I think that question is even more prescient for, for America's allies who are not spending, you know, one and a half trillion US dollars per year, right? That money has

- To count nothing. Like,

- Right. You know, we, we can afford to be a bit sloppy and lazy and, you know, duplicative and wasteful in our spending. I'd like to see us be better in that regard. But, you know, for, you know, for UK or for, you know, an Estonia or a Latvia, you know, there's, there's a lot less margin for error. And I think that investments really matter. And I think the, the real opportunity here is I would argue that the, you know, the countries of Europe, you know, including the UK are and have learned the lessons of Ukraine more I think than even the United States has. They're closer to that problem. I think they care more about it. And I think there's an opportunity to see the, the investments that they are making, you know, whether those are through new resources or just through a reallocation of existing resources, go more toward these kinds of new future oriented capabilities that we're talking about here today. And I think like the actually important part of that is this is what will allow those allies to be even more capable, even more relevant, and frankly punch way above their weight geopolitically and strategically. You know, like I, I just don't believe that if, you know, you pick a random country in Europe, it doesn't have a large defense budget and they decide to spend most of it on buying, you know, 14 F 30 fives. I, I don't think that that adds a lot to the kind of collective alliance capacity of nato. Whereas if they, you know, sort of took that same amount of money and bought massive quantities of low cost weapons, that creates a real deterrent against, you know, kind of broader Russian aggression on the European continent. I think that has a far more salutary effect in terms of the investment that you're getting out of those dollars. And I think that, you know, is, is the real question for the UK where, look, you know, the, the UK has politics the same as the United States, right? I see, you know, decisions that are being taken for reasons of domestic politics and, and sort of legacy industrial base and jobs. And that's a real reality. You can't wish that stuff away. But at the same time, my hope is that, you know, there is a real opportunity to move into more of these, you know, kind of future oriented capabilities. It's certainly something that Andel in the UK has been, has been seeking to support the UK government, the British government with, I think there's a huge amount of opportunity here. But as you rightly called out, you know, it's, it's, it's gonna get more challenging before it has the possibility of getting better.

- Are you impressed by the Ukrainian capability, what they've been able to build up over the past four years? And they're, especially obviously in drones, but, but also in other areas.

- There's no way that anybody looking at the war in Ukraine cannot be anything other than impressed by what Ukraine has done. But again, right, it's, it's to some extent not surprising. I mean, when you go back and look at the history of Ukraine as an industrial power, as a center of industrial production for the former Soviet Union, you know, it's, it's almost as if, you know, in, in its inestimable way, Russia always makes bad decisions, right? It's like they, they basically invaded Huntsville, Alabama, and then they're wondering why, you know, all of this innovation and sort of technological production has just grown up in response. Not to mention just like the political will to resist the invasion of their country. Like I couldn't have picked a worse place in Europe for them to have invaded, you know, which again, like, you know, would that Russia continues to be unlucky and misfortunate, so there's no way that you can look at it and, and not be impressed and to some extent not be surprised. I think at the same time, we shouldn't over index on exactly the solutions that the Ukrainians are producing, right? What the Ukrainians are doing is what is right for Ukraine, it's what's right for the fight that they're fighting, you know, the, the very tactical nature of it, the very landed nature of it, the obvious sort of rapid changing nature of it. And I think the broader lessons that we have to take away, you know, as the United States, as Europe, as the UK is not that we should just go off and, and buy exactly the solutions that the Ukrainians are building. It's more looking at the way that they're building it, looking at the, you know, the types of choices they're making. They're not gold plating these systems. They're, they're, they're building systems that are going to work today that they can get out into the field in large numbers, and then they can change and iterate on the fly and build the next version. And that's what's allowing them to adapt and keep pace, you know, with the changing nature of that battlefield. To me, that's the great lesson of Ukraine. It's not some specific technology or innovation or product. It is the entire approach that the Ukrainian military and society and industrial base has been taking to learn and adapt and to build and rebuild the capabilities that are keeping them in the fight, you know, four years onward from the, the original invasion, right? I mean, there's the great line that is attributed to some Ukrainian military leader. You're not going to beat a large Soviet army with a small Soviet army. You're going to have to do it, you know, through innovation and, and technology. And I think that's exactly what they've done, and it's immensely impressive. And I think there's a lot of lessons to be learned and a lot of opportunities frankly, for industrial collaboration and technology transfer and other things coming out of the war, which is obviously far from over. But I think this is the, the phase that I think Ukrainian society is now in is, is really recognizing that they have a lot to provide the rest of, of Europe and the West. And I think there's a lot that, that we in the west and, and the United States and Europe could learn from Ukraine and, and continue to do to support them.

- And with regard to the Russians, it seems it was their intelligence that helped the Iranians to hit your aac, your aac plane on the ground. Should we take that as a, as a aggressive, a move from the Russians, or should we just take it for granted that the Russians always help America's enemies with intelligence when they have the opportunity to, and we just sort of shrug and move on?

- Yeah, I think this is the, again, to just like, you know, caveat what I said earlier, right? I mean, or or to caveat what I'm about to say by rephrasing what I said earlier. I mean, I'm just reading, you know, the same as you reports in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and, and other places, you know, so I I I saw that article the same as you. I don't have access to any special information behind it. My point is that I just wasn't surprised when I read it, right? Yeah. And I wasn't surprised because I just think that in the person of Vladimir Putin, we have someone who is, you know, whether he started that way or how he got that way, you know, whether he is always been that way is just like irreparably anti-American. And he just believes that what is bad for America is good for Russia, what is bad for Europe is good for Russia. So of course he would support America's enemies, of course he would be doing things to enable, you know, the Iranians or the North Koreans or the Chinese or whomever to make life worse for the United States or worse for the European Union or the uk. We shouldn't be surprised by this, right? And I think what's so disappointing about the past, you know, 15, 20 years or so, is how often we're surprised by things that should be obvious and explainable for reasons of the person of Vladimir Putin, the sort of historical memory of of, of this particular group of people who are, who are running Russia still to this day. Which again, I think, you know, oftentimes is, is a failure of imagination, right? I mean, when I go back to the, the months leading up to the war in Ukraine, there were so many people who just said, there's no way that he would do this. This is impossible, right? Because they were mirror imaging this, they were looking at this, the way we would look at this and not looking at it the way he looks at it and making those types of decisions. And I think that is the, you know, the thing that keeps me up most at night is that we still don't actually take our adversaries at their word. I'll never forget, you know, you know, a mutual friend and colleague of ours at the Hoover Institution, Steve Kotkin wonderful historian of Stalin and Soviet Union tells this wonderful story of how as he was doing his research for his Stalin biographies, he got access to Stalin's diaries, right? So, and this was the opportunity to get, you know, beneath all of the surface or get to the actual heart of the matter and figure out like, what did this guy think in his most guarded and private moments? What was he telling only himself? And he got into the diaries and he came away with a cool, like, this guy was a committed communist, like he actually believed all this stuff. And you go into his diaries and he is like talking about how, you know, all these things are true and you know how to advance the great cause. And you know, it turns out that we should probably spend more time listening to what, you know, Xi Jinping is saying in public and, and saying in private. And same with Putin. And the same with, you know, the, the leaders in Iran and North Korea, they might actually believe the things that they're saying. And I think that we too often discount these things. And in reality, historically people have a bad habit of actually saying what they mean and meaning what they say, and doing what they say and mean.

- Exactly true of Stalin, true of Hitler, true of so many people who the west constantly doesn't want to take it their word. So this brings us on obviously to the AYAs who say year in, year out that when they get the nuclear bomb, they're going to annihilate Israel. The Israelis therefore personally perfectly understandably take that, take them at their word. And yet it seems that the rest of the world always assumes that, that actually this is just rhetoric. Do you think it's just rhetoric or do you think they really would, were they to get a nuclear bomb? And, and thereby making it perfectly understandable by firstly, Israelis and the rest of the world should always do anything possible to stop Iran from getting a nuclear bomb?

- You know, it's, it's a great question and you know, I I hazard to speculate on it because I, I do think the, you know, what, what I, I've seen in, you know, the long but not terribly long period of time, right? That I've been working in government and out of government and have, have spent a lot of time looking at and, and working on the question of Iran and the Iranian regime. Yeah, absolutely. Have a committed ideological streak. Like all the things that you're saying are things that we have to take very seriously. I think at the time or at times, they also have a very pragmatic streak, right? That, that demonstrates that they're not suicidal as a, as a, as a regime. I, I think the bigger concern that I would have, and certainly I'm, I'm, you know, very confident Israel has, is the old adage that, you know, capability changes very slowly and intent changes very quickly, right? So there's the question of, you know, we can all speculate about what would Iran do if they had the bomb. I think the, the question becomes like, if they actually got the bomb, how quickly could their intentions change? And you know, I I, I don't know, but I think that it's, it's, it's right to focus on denying them the capacity to even be able to contemplate that or have that, you know, have that choice. And I think, you know, history in recent decades is replete with opportunities to include it sounds like, again, from reading published reports, only just, you know, in, in the past weeks and months, the United States and, and the allies and partners of the United States have offered Iran, you know, access to civilian nuclear power and you know, all the things that you would want if you truly wanted to have a, you know, a, a domestic peaceful, you know, nuclear energy program. And they have consistently said no to that for reasons that you can only surmise is not because, you know, they want to just control the fuel cycles because they also wanna have the opportunity to weaponize it. And I think that we're, we're right to focus on that. So, no, I, I, I, I think it's something we have to take very seriously, but, you know, it's, it's why I've consistently stood behind the belief that, you know, a regime of this nature cannot be allowed to have weapons of that, of that character.

- Can we talk about ai, last question, really, AI presumably has completely revolutionized your world in the last, in the last few years, how your robotic phyto jet, for example, how dependent is that on, on ai, general ai, advanced ai, and all the other things of AI that we're facing at the moment?

- Yeah, it's, it, it's certainly something that is, that is emerging rapidly. And the answer that I give you today is very different than the answer that I might have given you even two or three years ago. I, I think in, in the system, in that robotic fighter jet, just to take an example. But I think that the answer is similar across a lot of other technologies that we're building. I would argue that, you know, in, in the scope of, you know, kind of where artificial intelligence is and sort of our day-to-day private lives, right? The way that we all use these large language models in our, in our private lives, you know, which are ways that like often make me better and I'm sure in other ways make me, you know, far stupider what we're talking about is actually like more rudimentary applications of artificial intelligence and machine learning, because I think that what we are ultimately building is a weapon system and you know, there's just an enormous amount of care that has to be put into what you are allowing a weapon system to do autonomously. Right? I think people forget that autonomy is not a noun. It is, it is a relational, you know, kind of description, right? It is, it is a thing that exists between two actors where there is a superior actor, you know, kind of granting autonomy to an inferior or a subordinate actor the same way, you know, a superior commander would delegate, you know, decisions to, to subordinate actors in sort of a military chain of command. And I think we think about it that way, right? So like, what are the tasks that we can delegate to this autonomous system in the form that it is currently in, right? And, you know, maybe it's a terrible analogy, right? But, you know, if you were to think about a, a brand new junior officer rated pilot, you know, who doesn't have a lot of hours in the cockpit, you're not going to give them the most complex, you know, kind of long range bombing missions that you know, again, to read published reports. Air Force colonels are flying, you know, into Iran and they're doing it for that reason, right? You, you, you are trusting someone who has more time and more experience, you know, more training, et cetera to do those kinds of things. So I think where we are today, people would look at it in the scheme of like how they think about artificial intelligence and say, this is, this is pretty rudimentary. But I also think that it's just the beginning and you know, with the now introduction of, you know, large language models, the ability to do things that, you know, previously we hadn't even been able to contemplate, like, for example, voice command of robotic systems, the ability to actually command these systems to go off and do things the same way that a human pilot would command a, a subordinate pilot to go off and perform missions, to be able to provide intent, you know, by voice and for have that, you know, that, that that robotic system understand the intent, take the command by voice and go off and execute that mission autonomously. These are now things that are possible in a way that weren't possible even just a few years ago because of the just rapid advancement that we're seeing in artificial intelligence. And, and again, I think, you know, when we, when we sort of look back, you know, even five years in the future to say nothing of, you know, 15 or 20 years, you know, we're probably gonna laugh at, you know, the, the state of the technology that it is in today, as cutting edge as it is, it's nothing close to what it's going to be in a year and five years, a decade or two decades. If the government and, and, and you know, the, the, the partners that we're working with allow it to get better at the speed that it is capable of getting better at, which doesn't just have to do with the technology. It has arguably even more to do, you know, with the regimes that we have in place for training and for testing and for set, you know, acceptance of these systems so that they can actually be put into the hands, so to speak, metaphorically of, of human operators and used as the tools that they are. Like, there's a lot of care and time and effort that is spent bringing new technology into war, fighting, you know, organizations as there should be. And I think that we have a lot of history of how to do that, you know, law, legal wise, doctrinally policy wise. And I think that we, we actually can fall back on that. I think this is how we have done this before. It's I think how we will be able to bring these kind of incredibly more advanced technologies into the operations, into organizations and, and be able to put them to use in the way that we need them to.

- What book, what biography or or military history book are you reading at the moment? Chris,

- I was afraid you were gonna ask this question. So I I possibly like you and I'd love to hear your answer to this. I, I always have multiple books going and, you know, at, on the one hand I've got, I always try to keep, keep a novel going and I've kind of gotten myself onto a Cormick McCarthy kick. I'm reading No Country for Old Men right now, which is just a wonderful book about, you know, just this sort of existence of an explicable evil in the world and how in many ways we're, we're just not sort of, you know, capable of dealing with it and just kind of the way the passage of time, you know, to some extent like leads us back into tragedy. I just, I take a lot from fiction. I find it just like massively mind expanding and kind of imagination expanding, and frankly it's a nice break from the stuff I have to do for a living. But at the same time, I mean, I, I love history as I mentioned, my, my dad's a historian. I, I didn't ever get any proper training as a historian. I never actually took history classes in university. So, you know, basically I've just had to do this on my own and I, I I find that I just kind of like delve in and out of periods that I, that I take an interest in. And, you know, at the moment, the period of time that I've become very, very interested in is kind of that latter half of the 20th century. I mentioned it earlier in kind of European context, but I think in a US context, what's really interesting to me, and you know, to answer your question directly, I, I'm, you know, just at the very beginning of HW brands is American Colossus. I've got a biography of William McKinley sitting on my shelf to, to go at next is that, you know, it's a period of time that feels very reminiscent to the period that we're currently in. You had a massive amount of technological change, societal disruption, economic disruption, and a set of sort of government institutions and processes and, and arguably societal institutions and economic institutions that were just utterly ill-equipped to deal with the changes in, you know, technology, demography, society, economy that we, that we saw playing out in that sort of latter part of the 19th century. And I think that there was a governmental response that, that actually enable us to harness the benefits that we saw coming out of the industrial revolution. You know, a lot of the technological revolution that was occurring at that period of time that that sort of set the scene for America becoming really the kind of like global superpower that it began to emerge in the, you know, as it began to emerge in the early 20th century. And I, I kind of look, there's no period of time you can go back and just kind of draw a direct historical parallel to present days, right? But I do find a lot of this stuff has a tendency to rhyme as Mark Twain used to say. And I think that it is illustrative to, to look back to periods of time where, you know, government and, and leaders and industrial leaders were wrestling with the types of problems that I think we're wrestling with now where to me, we're gonna have to just reinvent governmental institutions the way we think about our economy, the way we think about our society and education going well beyond the stuff we're talking about here in terms of military technology. But certainly that too. And I think we're, frankly, I think as a society, as in a country, we're, we're abjectly failing to do that. And I think that's why you consistently have this just deep seated frustration on part of the American public that they can't articulate. It's like a primordial scream that they know things are broken, they know the system is failing, they know things are changing in a way that feels like it's happening to us rather than something that, that we are in charge of and driving benefit from. And I think that until we have sort of a transformation in leadership in terms of how we're thinking about this as a government and as other sort of major portions or sectors of our society and economy to really take advantage of these technologies and, and show that they can produce abundance and surplus and, and sort of serve the greater good. I think our politics are gonna be pretty nasty and tribal because we're essentially like we are fighting over scarcity. I mean, that's the nature of sort of tribal politics in a certain way, right? It, it sort of, you know, pushes us back to our, our worst, you know, worst angels of our nature. So my hope here is yeah, as I kind of like look for sort of periods of time that can be illustrative to sort of the types of challenges that we're facing now and in sort of the years and decades to come. Like that's kind of why I jump in and outta books and, and you know, try to sort of delve into periods of history and, you know, we'll, we'll we'll see if this is a, a, a right endeavor or a wrong one. But, you know, again, would welcome all of your thoughts and guidance on this 'cause you forgot more about it than I know

- It's always a, the right endeavor to, to look at history. I can of course assure you of that. And I'm really pleased that you are reading HW Brands. We must have him on this show actually. He's, he's a it's a good idea historian. Good idea. What about your, what if your, your counterfactual

- Yeah, it's, I it's like history is replete with them, right? And, and I feel like the interesting question for me is, is is it's like we always think of the what ifs as you know, well something, something plays out and then all of it would've played out in a totally different way. But there's also these ways in which, you know, the what if then triggers a whole series of events that we couldn't predict. And it's unclear that the original what if event would've led to the conclusion that we, that we sort of foresaw. But you know, look, I I look at these kind of major moments in history that easily could have gone the other way, the south winning the Civil War, right? Or there being a, you know, a stalemate there. I mean, so many ways in which it, it could have turned out differently than the way that it did. You know, you know, kind of, I think more recently when you look at, you know, in the 20th century, you have an absolutely war weary American public after World War ii. Look, it took an act of leadership to decide that having just gone through four years of apocalyptic conflict, nonetheless the right response was to, you know, kind of bear the burdens of global leadership once again to kind of try to backfill the erosion of the British empire to take up commitments in Greece and Turkey and NATO and these kind of other areas, Korea, because it was going to have a stabilizing effect. And I think that those, those decisions easily could have gone the other way. And had they gone the other way, you know, we wouldn't be talking about, you know, a four decade cold war. We could have been talking about World War III very easily, very easily, you and a, and a very different position for the United States, you know, kind of coming through the, the, the 20th century. So there's just so many of these areas where, again, like the, the lesson that I take as I read history is just again, like, I feel ridiculous kind of explaining this to you is just how remarkably contingent all of this stuff is. You know, how easily, you know, events that were outside of the control of the major actors in the dramas, you know, just easily could have blown one way or the other. And, you know, history could have ended up wildly, wildly differently than, than it, than it otherwise did. And I guess like the main lesson that I take from that frankly is just an immense amount of humility, you know, that I think we, we think and we want to believe that we have this kind of great control and agency over events and I think as Americans we're particularly, you know, guilty of, of having that, you know, kind of belief that we can kind of like unilaterally steer events the way that we want them to go because of the immense amount of power we've had over the past several decades. And I, I just think that history teaches us the absolute opposite answer, frankly, even our own recent history should teach us the opposite answer, which is even when we think we have a significant amount of control and agency we never do, and whatever sort of decision we enter into, we should enter into with immense amount of humility and a deep belief that, you know, kind of the, I don't know, enduring kind of tragic nature of, of, of, you know, kind of humanity is always lurking there, you know, prepared to kind of do things that we can't predict. And, you know, that to me is something that doesn't, you know, it shouldn't paralyze us. It shouldn't be something that, you know, leads us to, to never act for fear of the consequences. But like, boy, to me it, it, it certainly continues to make me deeply humble about the decisions that I take in my own life and, you know, kind of the, the broader things that I might have some control over.

- Those sentiments were brilliantly expressed by Winston Churchill in his eulogy to Neville Chamberlain in, in November, 1940. I do recommend any listener to, to read those because he, he puts it beautifully. That's a great point. I have hugely enjoyed this. There's only, I think, one thing that I would take that I would disagree with you on, and that's when you were saying that in no country for old men, the inexplicable evil in the world, the mankind's is, is helped us to do anything very much about it. It strikes me that what you are doing, what Andre's doing, what the American defense industry is doing is genuinely trying to do something about the inexplicable evils that are posed by countries like, like Iran and, and China, North Korea and Russia. So thank you very much indeed, Chris Bros, for coming on Secrets of Statecraft.

- Thank you. Pleasure's mine, and thank you very much for having me on.

- Thank you, Chris. On the next episode of Secrets of Statecraft, my guest will be Lord Daniel Hannon, a regular columnist on the Sunday Telegraph.

- This podcast is a production of the Hoover Institution, where we generate and promote ideas advancing freedom. For more information about our work, to hear more of our podcasts or view our video content, please visit hoover.org.