SkyFoundry and the Future of American Drone Production at Scale

(upbeat music) My name is Ryan Evans and you are listening to the COGS War Podcast, focused on defense technology and industrial issues brought to you by, of course, War and the Rocks and our friends at Boos Allen. In this episode, I sat down with Congressman Pan Harygan of North Carolina, also a military veteran. He introduced the Sky Foundry Act to transform the way we produce drones at scale on this country or to finally allow us to start producing drones at scale. It's an exciting law that makes some big muscle moves and got rolled into the National Defense Authorization Act. Enjoy the show. Let's start with this. What is Sky Foundry? Sky Foundry is an initiative to have the production capability to produce a million drones a year in this country. And it's broken up into two different facets. It has a SUAS Innovation Lab that we call the CIL, has a production management facility, manufacturing facility called the PMF. Those two things can work in tandem, but they're separated. There are be separate facilities and you can have multiple different production manufacturing facilities across the country or across the globe as our partners buy into the Sky Foundry concept. But effectively, what it is is it nestles inside the organic industrial base. And the SUAS Innovation Lab is where you get the synthesis of SOCOM operators. So you've got some of the guys that are on the front lines all across the world and layering that around a private sector backbone. So you have an infusion of private sector companies. And there's no limit to how many companies can actually be infused into the system. I envision it's going to be dozens of companies. And effectively, what we're doing is we're trying to keep inside of the CIL what is being produced in the PMF at the cutting edge of technology. And the way that we have envisioned this working is very much like we will invite private sector companies to prove that they should be sitting at the Sky Foundry table, those that have the trust of the warfighters that have gained that knowledge base, that experience sufficient to say from the warfighters perspective that we want you around the table. And the cool thing about that is it's totally agnostic to what size a company you are. You can be a dude that's in your garage that has a bunch of 3D printers that's doing some crazy wazoo stuff that you've been able to demonstrate to a sufficient level to convince a bunch of special operators you should be there all the way up to Lockheed Martin. And everybody in between doesn't matter how big you are, doesn't matter how small you are, it's how much capability are you going to provide to the system. And that is where we marinate the latest and greatest technology in drives, which as we know is moving on a four to six week cycle right now. And we've got to constantly iterate that technology. And we've got to transition that technology from research and development into manufacturing, in bulk at scale, in an incredibly short period of time. When we first got to the committee back in January, we've been hitting drones from the very beginning. And I actually kind of felt like we were wearing out our welcome on the committee because we were talking about drones as both a capability that we lack. Looking at the modern battlefield that is in Ukraine and what we've seen in the Middle East and throughout Africa with our adversaries using these very inexpensive yet very capable technologies that we don't have those capabilities. We just don't. The capabilities that we have very exquisite, very expensive that we have in very low volume. And that's not what's happening overseas. So we lack this capability, but we also, poignantly, lack the ability to defeat these capabilities in number one, a cost effective way. And number two, in any real general purpose way at scale. And so I've been very, very concerned about drones and was kind of sounding the alarm every chance I would get during committee. And nobody was listening to me because I was a freshman. And they're like, what is this crazy guy talking about? He keeps like, he's obsessed with drones and then Operation Spider's Web happened, right? Where Ukraine took a $117,000 worth of a tritable drone systems and destroyed $7 billion worth of Russian assets to include 30% of their strategic bomber fleet. And at that point, everybody said, oh shoot, this guy here again, kind of knows what he's talking about. Maybe we should give what he's saying, some greater consideration. And that kind of led to a lot of green lighting of what we were doing this year. So I'll let the listeners read it for themselves. It's actually very short. And we'll put it in the show notes. You can read it in less than five minutes, which is my kind of legislation. You ask for a government-owned government-operated contractor, augmented facility, run by the Department of the Army that is able to build a million small drones annually. Yep. That's pretty ambitious. And I want to unpack different aspects of it. Why a million? Well, I come from a manufacturing background. So I got over 100,000 square feet of manufacturing in North Carolina started in my double-wide trailer. We make weapons and munitions. And the reality of manufacturing, anybody will tell you. It doesn't matter what scale. It doesn't matter whether it's in your garage or whether you've got multi-hundred thousand square foot, multi-million square foot facilities, manufacturing sucks. It's really hard. It's difficult. It's a skill that we've lost in this country. And I know that if we end up in a conflict right now, just looking at the lessons we're learning from Ukraine itself, where there's going to be 10 million drones used by both sides in that conflict across 2025. And probably about 5 million by the Ukrainians, 5 million by the Russians, that if our numbers 50,000, that is a really poor strategic position for us to be in. If that is the methodology that's causing 82% of casualties on the modern battlefield, we're just fundamentally not prepared to fight that next war. We're looking at the last one in our experience from the end of the Afghan conflict and saying that that's the type of conflict that we're facing. That's not the type of conflict that's playing out across the globe right now. So number one, we're not ready. But number two is if we do need to fight that conflict, we're going to need 20 million of these things. Because Russia, Ukraine, is a very small regional conflict. We are looking at potential conflict in multiple theaters overseas, but very particularly against the most sophisticated and dangerous adversary that probably we've ever faced in our nation's history, which is China. So we're going to need 20 million of these things. And I just know from a manufacturing perspective that it's a lot easier to go from 1 million to 20 million than it is to go from zero to 1 million. So getting to that 1 million mark is really critically important for our national security. And I want to talk a little bit more later on. And to be with you a little bit on what we shouldn't be learning from Ukraine. And I'll come back to that because you made some interesting points there. But on this specific model, government-owned, government-operated contractor augmented, I was wondering how you came up with that because it's a pretty common model for service depots, right? But for the emissions, we often see government-owned contractor operated. So I want to get a sense of how you arrive there. Yeah. Well, I would say that it's a hybrid model that's never been used before, primarily because go-go, government-production, government-operated, government-owned, government-operated, or government-owned contractor-operated. Both of those models are kind of failed models. They don't really work very well. And if you look at government-owned, government-operated, you have some of the worst examples of production problems that we face right now moving forward into the future. And you understand why they exist. I think everybody who's in the defense industry understands why the organic industrial base exists, right? You take 155-- how it's arounds. OK, when we're at war, we need 2 1/2 million of them a year. When we're not at war, we need 140,000 of them to train. There's no private company that can take a 90% demand hit. So the government comes in and just supports that national critical need that we have. The problem is, they don't work as designed for a lot of different reasons. But what happened historically is we've atrophied from what we're supposed to be able to produce at those organic industrial base facilities to what we can actually produce oftentimes struggles to hit even 15% of the original intended goal. And that is a massive problem. And it's a problem because in the government model, we almost reward complacency. And so it really is a failed model. And whether it's GoGo or whether it's GoCo, they really have the same problems. And the concern that I have on the GoCo side is that you really don't have competition. And that is, I think, where the two models fail. You don't have competition either one. And so I think if what you can do is you can take a government investment in manufacturing capability and build that around a private sector backbone. That is a model that's never existed, which is where we come up with a government-owned, government-operated contractor-assisted framework broken up between an innovation lab, what we call the SUAS Innovation Lab, the SIL, and a production manufacturing facility that we call the PMF. It's just done in a different way that's never been done before. But I think that highlights that demand cycle issue that you have. But then you've also got-- we have massive appropriations issues right now. And I think one of the biggest issues across defense is that there has been a lot of politicians that are writing checks with their mouth that the government can't write. And I'm very, very concerned about capabilities that we invest in on one time injections like reconciliation. And that investment dying on the vine because we can't tell you what the appropriations are going to look like two years from now, three years from now, four years from now, depending on what the situation the world looks like. In some ways, the model-- and I'm not saying this is good or bad. I'm open to being convinced that it's good. It's kind of out of time with this emphasis on commercial first, not neoprimes, non-traditional companies. I imagine some of them might have not been thrilled to see this, for example, because in a way creates the government as a competitor operating its own facilities and joint production facilities at scale. What do you say to that? I'd say that that is a misunderstanding that came out of an improper brief from the Army at AUSA. And that's been something that has-- Well, I think I read the bill, and I think it's not an unfair interpretation, right? I think it is an unfair interpretation, because the whole backbone of this thing is the private sector. What we're envisioning in this is you make the transition from that innovation lab to the manufacturing facility is that there's actually a per-unit royalty that's generated back to the intellectual property holders for whatever ultimately gets contributed and utilized. And what I've encouraged the Army to do is come up with a very clear formula of how to pay those companies. And they're working on doing that right now. I mean, that's part of the process. It's probably one of the more complicated processes here. But what we want, in the end, is we want a lot of private sector competition. If you don't have that private sector competition, the whole system gets stale, and you start producing yesterday's technology with tomorrow's dollars, we can never allow that to happen inside of this structure. And the way that you do that is you make the private sector compete to continually topple each other's intellectual property that's actually being used. And what is the terminal effect we're looking for in the drones that we're producing? What are the performance characteristics of the brushless motors and the other components of the drone that actually allow us to achieve superior capability on the battlefield against our adversaries? And how do you transition that over to manufacturing in real time? And so while it is a go-go model on the innovation lab, it actually transitions over to a go-go model on the production facility. And so you've got the private sector running the production facility. That's also a really cool aspect of this. Now using government dollars to purchase the assets that are owned by the government. But at the end of the day, operated by the private sector, and then there is a royalty that is paid based on equation. And I've talked to the Army about this, but you've got 13 different major components of every single drone. And it doesn't matter what size, shape, performance, characteristic, terminal effect, you're looking to achieve. But if you just come up with an equation, just like a law firm would come up with an equation, you've got 20 different lawyers working on a case. How do you figure out how to page lawyer? One sourced it, another did the research work, another one ran point on discovery, another one did depositions, and you've got four or five lawyers end up trying the case and so far and so forth. But they've all got a governing equation that they know that the work that they do, they're going to get compensated for that. We need to come up with a governing equation for this. And it's not Congress's responsibility to stipulate exactly what that looks like. That ultimately comes down to Army's execution authority. But I'm very confident that they'll come up with something that makes sense to everybody upfront. People know what they can get out of the system for what they put in. And they know that their intellectual property is going to be protected in the process, right? The Army can't just use their intellectual property and run away with that without compensating them. And so from that perspective, I think that's really the only way that we can have and acquire the capability to produce a million drones a year without having the acquisitions against those completely set in stone, which we don't need as a country right now. It's a super difficult problem set. And we're trying to be creative about how we solve it. And yes, we have $2.5 billion coming into the SUAS space right now from reconciliation. But here we are six months down the road. Reconciliation happened back in July. Those dollars have not hit. They're not being expended yet. We're asking some questions about where it is and where it's headed. But really, we're taking a very small portion of that $2.5 billion, less than $200 million to actually do this and execute this. And so I look at it as an insurance policy against indeterminable appropriations in the future. That's why it is something that once people, once we've had these conversations at length about what this actually looks like, the private sector is generally in favor of this. Under current contracting mechanisms, which by the way do not support anything that's happening in drones from an iterative, innovative reality that we're seeing on the ground on the day battlefield. Like we're having this technology change every four to six weeks. And we don't have a contracting mechanism that can procure capabilities instead of end items. We're stuck contracting capabilities buying this drone and I get it. You can upgrade software. You can do all these different things. But the reality is, is there's hundreds of different drones on the battlefield in Ukraine that have hundreds of different performance characteristics. They have hundreds of different desired terminal effects associated with it. If we try to solve the problem with one particular contract at item, we're going to fail. But that's the way that our contracting mechanisms are set up right out of the 250 companies that were displayed at AUSA that have drone capabilities that they are trying to sell to the government in any way, shape, or form that they possibly can. If there's a demand signal, by the way, because so far there hasn't been one. And other than just everybody kind of knows that we need to do this in some way, shape, or form. But again, where's the dollars for it? Haven't existed. And that's a huge problem. I cannot underscore like double underlying stop-my-foot twice. That is a massive problem. And it's going to be a massive problem going forward, particularly if we stay in the United States in peacetime. But all of that being said, at the end of the day, you have 250 different companies at AUSA that are potentially part of a productive defense ecosystem. But because of the way we contract, only four, or five, or six of them are going to get kinked. The rest of them are going to fail. And they're not necessarily going to fail because they have bad technology. They have irrelevant technology. They may just not have exactly what the Army needs right now. They might not have exactly what the Air Force needs right now. They might not have exactly what the Navy needs right now. But that's not necessarily reflective of the future battle space and what those battlefield circumstances are going to look like, what the capabilities that the service needs in real time at some point in the future. And so what do you do with all of this space where you've got very little demand for us? Because like, OK, we know we need to train with these. We need to train how to use them. Private Joe Stuffy's got to figure out how to employ these on the battlefield. He's got to be able to do that in a utilizing a tritable system, something that doesn't cost $30,000 and is going to generate a flipple and all sorts of other issues if he crashes it into a tree five times and destroys it. You've got to disassociate the accountability of the taxpayer from the military operator for these things. And you've got to figure out how to make them for less than $2,000. With a completely decoupled Chinese, non-Chinese supply chain. And so you've got to try to solve all of these questions with a very small amount of spend and capture that for the long term. And so to me, the best way to do that is simply create the system where take a lot of the individual catbacks, the serious catbacks that is going to be asked of the private sector in the space, take that off of the private sector, make the government do that because we don't know, wait, we need a million drones right now in terms of production capability, but we don't need a million drones. That's the problem. So, you know, and maybe that's where we should start, right? Is we need the production of capacity to make a million drones in this country, but we do not need to buy a million drones. We might need 50,000 right now until one day we need them. But if it takes two years to go from that 50,000 to a million, we are screwed in a future conflict. So, we need to be capabilities focused, production capability focus, but we do not need all those end items right now. - You put this in the army. - Yeah. - Why not make this a joint or inter-service? You know, I know you visited them or Marine weapons training, the Soviet Union, at Quantico, I think they're probably doing some of the most exciting things when it comes to small drones, Colonel Cuomo's unit out there. But why the army? - Well, it is everybody. Because the innovation lab is a SoCon-based product. And the production manufacturing facility is an army material command-based product. And so that SoCon is where you get effectively that joint interoperability, kind of that fusion cell concept of, hey, we've got operators all over the world on the front lines right now, leaning, you know, learning and cleaning the best lessons of the tech that's available out there and bringing that back to one centralized point where we are then fusing that with all of the best latest and greatest technology that the private sector is coming up with in real time. 'Cause the private sector's also mirroring what's happening in the public sector too, right? Like so much of the drone space is Ukraine inspired. It just is, you know, private sector companies or got civilians over there that are helping solve and problems for the Ukrainians and they're bringing those lessons learned back here into industry. But the reality is the lessons learned today are different than the lessons that are gonna be learned on the battlefield six weeks from now when Russia adapts again and starts either developing new tactics, techniques, procedures, or starts to modify their hardware and the response that goes back and forth, right? We don't have a contracting mechanism to keep up with that at the end of the day. And so we have to be capability focused and that's what ultimately happens in the still as we keep the very best capabilities, coalesced in that development environment and then there is a transfer, there is a movement, a shift in real time over to a production facility that is producing what we actually need for either our warfighters, others, there's so many different places it can go. It can produce components that get sold back into the private sector. I mean, this is complete and this is probably, you know, where we're gonna start, right? Is we need one of the most important things we need out of this is a decoupled Chinese, you know, non-Chinese supply chain. And if you can take the production of these components and actually sell them back out to the private sector, this is, it solves a lot of problems for the private sector. - I wanna go back to the issue of the fight, you know, focusing on the small aspect of small UAS and just to give a little context of how I think about this at least. When you're looking at aerial drones, Ukraine is really fighting three different campaigns. There's that fight within the first 30 kilometers of the front with these small first-person view drones that are either fiber optic cable or not and tons of attrition, replacement, optempo is insane. And that's really what you've focused on. There's also the long distance one where either they smuggle those smaller systems in like they did with the operation you alluded to earlier or they have these very long range drones that go, you know, over, let's say, 1,000 kilometers or something like that. There's that middle campaign that they're fighting, but it's kind of almost missing. Mike Kaufman calls it a donut hole is where everything in between there. And that's something where Ukraine is struggled and assuming they're able to stay in the fight next year, that's where I think they'll make the most progress is in fleshing out that middle of the donut hole. This solution is really focused on that problem of fighting 30 kilometers in the front, within the front. To me, if we end up fighting that way, that is a huge failure of the joint force. Like, we're not gonna, I would hope, have to fight like Ukraine or Russia's fighting right now. To me, I think more about how we can use drones from a newver and that requires these sort of mid-range drones to be operating in concert with each other, you know, 100 kilometers, 200 kilometers behind the front, behind the enemy front. So when I read your bill, a lot of it is, I see a lot of goodness. It's like, well, we obviously do need these systems. I'm not saying we don't need these smaller systems, but I worry that this might be forcing us to over-index on those systems rather than find the right drones that would fit our way of war and how we would fight. - Yeah, no, I think that that's a relevant point, but what I would say to that in return is China has spent $30 billion a year on this SUAS space, that Group 1, 2, 3 space, and they've done that every year for the last 15 years, and we're now coughing up $2.5 billion to try to catch up. And so we are not adequately addressing the threat that this space presents us because like it or not, we're gonna find ourselves in this space. And I agree with you. It's not where we're ultimately gonna find the decisive end to whatever future conflict we may find ourselves in, but what you do see right now is, you know, that 30 kilometer buffer that exists, that 30 kilometer buffer doesn't exist because of drones, it exists because of artillery. And the drones are what's, you know, hunting people inside of that space that are kept in a standoff distance away by artillery. And so all of the traditional things that we have known and relied upon and conflict are still there on the modern battlefield, they're just not playing as the size of a role. They've kind of frozen people on the ground, but at the end of the day, you still gotta find fixed finish. How are you gonna do that? And I would say too that the private sector has all of the solutions to the problems that we face. I have 100% confidence in that. It's not like the government can do this better. I'm very concerned about appropriations. And I can't underscore how concerned I am about it because if you look at where we are, we've never spent less on defense as a percentage of our GDP since World War II. And simultaneously, we just crossed over $38 trillion in debt. No, by the way, if you look at the first two months of this fiscal year, we're running a $2.63 trillion annualized deficit, record-breaking deficit. And we haven't even started the war. And so my biggest concern is where do all of these dollars come from to solve the problems that we have? I think we've gotta be very discerning about how we move forward in some of these spaces where we're at a significant strategic deficit versus our adversaries like China who has spent $30 billion a year in this space. And by the way, that's a real $30 billion, notwithstanding that they get a five to six X multiplier dollar for dollar on manufacturing capacity than we do here in the country. I mean, it's a massive strategic deficit. And so I don't think we're over indexing here, but I think we're under indexed on everything. I agree with that. And that's unfortunately we're not making choices. The budget should be higher. Golden dome could eat up 10% of the defense budget over the next 10 years, which I think is insane, but we're not here to talk about Golden dome. But I think the reason China is spending so much on small US and same with Russia and Ukraine, by the way, is they're all doing this out of weakness. I mean, if Ukraine earlier in the war had more artillery munitions, then they drones wouldn't feature quite as prominently as they do now. What I worry about and not to belabor the point is, you know, these adversaries, Russia, China, they're adopting the small US strategy of weakness. And I just wonder if that's, if we really double down there, if we're really doubling down on our own strengths rather than the weak adaptations or adaptations of necessity by our adversaries. You know what I mean? Because no one can rival still the American strike complex, not in terms of mass and magazine depth right now. But we do, and I realize we need to shift away from the high-end exquisite and few model. I'm just worried that we're shifting, we're talking about shifting away too far in the other direction. I don't think we need to shift away from the high-end in exquisite and please don't misunderstand it. If I've stated opposite, not what I mean. Let me maybe just read it in the prelude of the story. Let me zoom back out in time, right? We've got to understand how we win our nation's wars. If you look back to the end of World War II, all the way through present day, we have lost every single conflict that we participated in except for Desert Storm. And you have to ask yourself the question, why? And it's because we have a military that has created a capability to fight in a defense industrial base that is designed to support that, that uses these very exquisite, very highly capable technologies to achieve strategic over-match against our adversaries in a very short period of time. The problem is, is if we don't achieve that strategic over-match in a very short period of time, we end up in a protracted conflict where we lose the economics of that conflict really badly. And ultimately, we lose the conflict. So war is all about the economics of conflict and we're losing it. Like we have become, in our industrial bases, become really good at producing the high-cost problems to our enemy's low-cost solutions. And so I've always been very respectful of our adversaries. Everybody said, you know, Talban, they're not capable, they freaking beat us, period. Now, I never lost to them on the battlefield as a special operator. I crushed them every single time at the tactical level, but they beat us at the strategic level. And it's because they endured us. Look at the global war on terror in general versus how we engaged against the Soviets with the Mujahideen, by the way, in Afghanistan, right? We were launching $8,500 circa 1985 dollar Stinger missiles at Soviet helicopters and fighters that cost between $2 and $9 million apiece, $8,500 investment, $2,9 million return on investment, phenomenal investment, right? And we printed the sucker. And not only did we cause the Soviet Union to lose that conflict, but we actually caused them to lose their country over it. It was part of the entirety of the Reagan playbook. Fast forward into the global war on terror. Back in Afghanistan, 2.0 this time it's us, not the Soviets, right? Soviets are playing on the other side as Russians now. But the reality is, is we have these very inexpensive IEDs that came up, right? $20 worth of farm supplies and some repurposed explosives, repurposed fertilizer. And our solution was let's make million dollar vehicles and roll them across the ground. And not just in Afghanistan, but in Iraq and all over Africa every single day. We've got multiple million dollar vehicles getting destroyed by $20 worth of farm supplies. And after 20 years of conflict, we get out endured by our adversary. And it's just, the cost is too great. It doesn't make it worth it for us. We lose the political will to continue to fight. And we freaking lose. And so we've got to pay attention to that, right? And this is where I get very concerned about Ukraine and where it is right now. Because we did not execute the response to Ukraine, which number one I'd like to say never should have happened, Ukraine only happened because of the fall of Afghanistan and then President Biden effectively signaling that he wasn't going to do anything about a minor incursion into Ukraine. So that war never should have happened. But when it did happen and he wanted to help the Ukrainians, what we ended up doing is we didn't use our military assistance. We didn't help Ukraine fight like we would have fought, which is stitching together all of these really incredible, really exquisite capabilities that we have all at one time. Instead, we piecemealed it into the conflict because we were worried about provoking some nuclear response out of Putin. And fundamentally stepping back, that was the worst military decision that has been made since, I would say, even the end of World War II. It's been that long, horrible military decision because what it did is when Ukraine initially repelled that initial conflict, you know, engagement from Russia. And they stood on their own two feet. We gave them some guns, we gave them some ammo. We sent some explosives in there. We sent some javelins. And then a few months later, we sent some stingers. And then six months into the war, we sent high mars. But we sent those high mars with restrictions. A few months after that, we're sending everything that we got in terms of our 1970s armor personnel carriers. And by the end of that first year, we're sending Bradley fighting vehicles in there. Right, six months later, we're sending M1 Abrams tanks two and a half years into the conflict. We're sending F-16s. So what we did by peace-mealing our capabilities into that theater is we actually gave Russia the military equivalent of antibiotic resistance to our capabilities. And now four years into this conflict, almost four years into this conflict. It's like taking a Z-pack, right? We all know when we get sick, you take two pills on day one and then you take a pill a day for four days, you wake up on the six day and you're good. What we did from a military perspective is take a quarter of a pill and feed it to Ukraine every three months. And we allowed Russia to adapt their techniques, their tactics, their procedures, their asset capabilities to not get find, fixed, or finished, and destroyed by our capabilities. And now we're in a spot where Russia has figured out what a war economy means for them, right? They're producing more 155 artillery rounds in the United States and Europe combined. When this war first kicked off, you were seeing a handful of missiles and drones go into Ukraine every day. A couple of years ago, it was dozens. Now it could be up to 800 on any given night. They have figured out how to survive and how to increase their industrial base. To a point where I actually very concerned about this conflict and what our role is in preserving our nation's ability to defend itself and project force around the globe, which is how we get kind of back into sky foundry. But I'm very concerned at this conflict that we're either at a point where we have to consider transferring more capability to Ukraine, which is a bad idea. Because the more capability that we transfer even to our allies, the less reserve capability that we have if we actually have to get into a conflict, which by the way is not our choice at this point, it is now Putin's choice and Putin's choice alone, the enemy gets a vote. And that may be a very real reality that we have to face or the West has to get directly involved in this conflict. And that conflict's not going to change unless one of those two things happen. Neither of those two are good things for us. And so I'm very hopeful President Trump actually gets a piece deal out of this because I think it's very good for us based on the way that we've decided to prosecute a protracted conflict outside of the way we're designed to fight and our industrial basis designed to support. But bottom line, we have to completely reinvision a portion of what we're doing for defense because they are not, our adversaries are not doing this out of weakness. They're doing it because it's the capability that they know that they have that can over time be used to defeat us. - So you threw a lot out there. - Yes. - Some of it I agree with. So the antibiotic analogy definitely and the dealing things out too slowly and giving Russia the chance to adapt. I agree with all of that. I don't think the president's going to get us to a piece deal, at least not anytime soon, but we'll set that debate aside. That's not what we're here to talk about. But I do want to talk about why we lose wars because you didn't make a good point. We've lost quite a lot of them. But the wars we lost, let's look at Afghanistan, which was prominent. We actually lost for many of the same reasons that the Soviets lost. The Soviets actually did better militarily than we did, which is something that's hard for us to talk about. But they lost because of politics, which is the same reason that we lost. Unlike in Iraq where we were getting the tar kicked out of us, but eventually we found we have the awakening movement among the Sunnis. We found the right Shia political partners that were able to deliver. That didn't happen in Afghanistan. We never found the right political partners. The Soviets never did either. They had some of the worst. They were constantly tearing their hair out over their Afghan communist partners and launched a coup to get rid of what on much like we did in Vietnam and had a lot of problems with the others. So the reasons we win this wars, the cost curves are important. I think they're especially important in the high end fight. Like if we're facing off against a country like China that can basically impose cost curves on us much that are similar in scale to what the hooties were able to deliver to us in the Red Sea, but it'd mass. We're using these multi-multimillion dollar systems to shoot down missiles that cost them and they don't very little money. That's the thing I'm afraid of. But I don't think it solves the problem of why we win wars, which ultimately has come down to politics rather than industry. I think it's structural. I really do. I've done a very significant analysis just internally about, OK, hey, my time as a special operator, somebody that was a student of history at West Point. And now sitting up here in the halls of Congress effectively being asked to look at the 300,000 foot picture of what's going on in the world and what our role in the world is and where we're succeeding and where we're failing. And I would say that the politics is a symptom of the process for us. And the reality is, look, I think a big part of the war in Ukraine is actually Putin and Xi working together to run a reverse playbook of what Ronald Reagan did against the Soviet Union, which was one of the most fantastical bankruptcies of another country that has ever happened in human history. And I think that they're running that in reverse against the United States very intentionally right now. And I think that this is a full spectrum warfare and that includes the dollar. And I think the more that we understand how much economics are tied to the outcome of conflicts, the better we're going to do in our conflicts. And I don't think you can detach those two things, because I think even as politics gets in the middle of that, and I would tell you, I've been at the pointy edge of the spear when politics gets involved in our politics sucks. Like we have very little political will over the long term, and that is a cultural problem that we have. But that being said, there are things that we could do to much, much improve the conditions by which we would never get to that point in the future again. And a lot of that comes straight back to the economics of it from the very beginning. This was great. Typically, don't have substantive conversations like this with elected officials. And so I don't know if it was any good. Now it was great. When we started with the bill, and we zoomed out to global strategies, that's the best conversation you could have. So thanks for being on the show. Hey, thanks for having me and really appreciate it. Thanks so much for listening to this episode of Cogs of War. 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