The Record Budgets and Missing Suppliers Shaping America's Munitions Ramp

Welcome to the Cogs of War podcast. I'm Jonathan Panter, Executive Editor of the Cogs of War Vertical, brought to you by War on the Rocks and Booz Allen Hamilton. Today we'll be discussing the Mnuchin supply chain. My guests are Brandon Daniels, the CEO of Exeger, a company that maps multi-year supply chains and flags risk with numerous government customers. We're also joined by the Honorable Mark Anderson, 18th Assistant Secretary of the Army for Financial Management and Comptroller, and by Joseph Gus Guastella, Executive Vice President for National Security at Voyager Technologies and retired U.S. Air Force Lieutenant General. Voyager delivers end-to-end propulsion and energetics. Gentlemen, thank you for joining Cogs of War. Thank you for having us. Yeah, this is great. Thank you. It's great being here. Yeah. So each of you comes from a very diverse set of backgrounds, and in many cases separate from this munitions discussion. So if you wouldn't mind just sharing with our listeners what brought you to where you are into munitions. Where I think we are is an expansion of the entire defense industrial base. Like, you know, munitions, energetics as a component of it, right? Because whether it's downstream for munitions, like how you're fusing those munitions to drones, or it's upstream, like where you're getting the underlying actual explosive content, the precursors, we help our customers to manage supply chains. And my background is actually doing two things. One, building super intelligence systems that help customers to manage the most complex aspects of their business portfolio, or their logistics, or their compliance efforts. Or my background is actually managing large-scale operational crisis. So from the early 2000s, where I helped with the reform of the healthcare industry, doing dozens of investigations into the off-label marketing of products and bribing of doctors. To the financial crisis in 2008, where I did investigations into three of the largest banks in the world. And then also, as we move forward, I was a part of the COVID-19 and pandemic response effort under Trump 1. And then when it comes to large-scale operational crisis, it was widely reported that we were the ones that essentially were able to trace the supply chains that showed that Huawei was rerouting equipment through China into Iran. Right. So now, our largest operational crisis, rebuild America's industrial base, right? And so when you think about it, what I'm doing is I'm bringing together technology that can help you to understand the problem, help you to identify solutions to the problem and implement those. And my background is doing it in big, multi-trillion dollar efforts. So that's how I get here. I get here, I think, you know, through my primary role as Assistant Secretary of the Army is to properly resource our army to fight and win our nation's wars. Right. So you kind of start there to what Brandon just talked about, too. I think about this beyond munitions, but really about the arsenal democracy, really the strengthening of the industrial base, organic defense industrial base. And, you know, this moment that we've had or we have that's seen pressure on that, right, that has allowed us to take good stock and good count of where we are against where we need to be, both to face the current fight as well as prepare for future fights. And then ultimately in a position of strength and deterrence. So I think that's a big part of it. My own background includes, you know, venture, startup, being a senior leader of, you know, global firms, but really, you know, heart of the Patriot. I'm grateful to have this opportunity to help serve and make a difference. We have an incredible team. That's one of the things, too, that there are just so many great folks, you know, every day, you know, at the Pentagon, they're working to solve this problem, but do it in a way and like today's guests that you put together really exemplify that, right? Do it in a way that we're not doing it alone. Doing it alone, government can't be the only solution, but how do we work together across government and industry to do what's necessary to maintain freedom in our role in the world? Well, I'm really glad to be here as well. Gus Costello, as was said, with Voyager, and you know, Voyager is committed to our national defense and filling a key capability gap that exists out there in the defense side of the house. Obviously, we're talking today about solid rocket motors, but Voyager crosses that in a lot of other areas. You know, my background, though, as originally an employer of a lot of advanced munitions as an Air Force guy for many years, certainly on the air-to-air munitions and air-to-surface munitions, but also, you know, later in my career as the absent commander, I had a second half of the area air defense commander, so also responsible for a lot of the air defense Patriot missiles that were out there. We shot several of them, but not compared with what they're shooting now, but I got a big appreciation for advanced munitions and that entire enterprise. And also, we were joking about it beforehand. I'm a survivor of, you know, the Air Force, of three, building three Air Force POMs, being right, as a programmer, being right next to my FM teammates, and that left a lot of scar tissue. Mark, I think you understand that. I understand there's a survivor's group. Yes. It meets frequently, and we're all together in this. But yeah, until you go through it, you don't understand it, right? POM anonymous. Because we talked about that a little bit, too, right? POM anonymous, like, if not, let's start one. Exactly. But it's one of those things, though, too, until you go through it, you don't completely understand it, even though you get it. But it also speaks to. Some of the things we were talking about, right? So, we have this process, and one of the things that, you know, how does this strengthen or cause a need to think about how we approach both resourcing our, you know, in my instance, right, the Army, but Air Force, others, right, the services to be successful, both direct through the POM process, through appropriations, and then, you know, some of the work we briefly talked about, too, is how we're thinking about doing that differently through strategic capital in other ways, right, working differently with the market. So. I know we'll talk a bit about that later, but we're all survivors here. I love the POM anonymous. One of the things that the Army has done in spades, and Mark, under your leadership, and Honorable Ingraham's leadership, and, you know, basically everyone that's really trying to drive the demand signal out into the defense industrial base, and then what you guys are doing at Voyager, Gus, I mean, the way that you're vertically integrating the supply chains, right, the way that you guys are making it, so that every part of the supply chain, and even going out and finding those, like, really gnarly single-sourced areas of the supply chain, acquiring them, investing in them, so that you can have that vertical integration be profitable long-term, is incredible. The thing that is the huge barrier to all of this effort, the CSOs, the OTAs, the awards coming out that are going to 15 different companies. Is the POM process. I don't know if the companies. Actually, I'll say I do know. The companies that are getting into the defense industrial base right now, the companies that are doing real dual-use, the companies that are building this technology, I'll even put myself in this bucket even though we've got a bunch of people that are really smart on this process, don't know how to build those multi-year campaigns of requirements, you know, getting into the defense industry, getting into a programmatic bit of funding, moving in and through crossing the chasm into Congress, getting Congress to support it, getting that PE line established, and then making it so that it has, I mean, really non-partisan support at this point, right? Because we've got a challenge into the future. You guys are on the front line of this, right? But I think what you're doing in strategic capital changes the narrative on that a little bit, right? But I think there's still some education on. How do we replicate like a Raytheon or a Lockheed or someone big on the prime side like Booz or SAIC, how do we replicate that motion for some of these other suppliers that are coming in and getting huge awards? I mean, for energy, for hardened infrastructure like the Blackbeard stuff we see Castilian doing, all of the great wins that Voyager has, how do we get those institutional. I think it's a great question. And one of the things I think a lot about in really two parts to describe briefly, part of it is we are expanding, changing, or rethinking the definition of the Arsenal democracy. Who are the participants, right? Because a big part of this has been, and I think there's room for everybody. I think that where there was pressure in the past, a little bit recent past around slow moving traditional providers, there's still room for those because we need capacity, right? We need the ability to count on people because one of the things too, that is sometimes perceived as slow moving is also certainty, right? And so I talk about certainty quite a bit, whereas you know this very well, we need things to work every single time, right? So innovation is awesome, moving quickly is fantastic, but we also need certainty of outcome. And so part of the mix of all this of new entrants is learning to work together, but also, you know, putting in the hands of our war fighters a hundred percent because that process matters for outcomes. Because we're not hoping it works, we're relying on it working, right? And that's, and those are life and death things. When we're part of that, the other side of this too, that we're working on doing to be a better customer, to be a better provider is creating that certainty that you both talked a little bit about, you know, long-term contracts, right? Long-term demand signals. If the president is seeking to make a generational investment in our security, national security, right? Through the $1.5 trillion proposed budget, that is an incredible demand signal, right? How do we break that demand signal apart as, you know, as you were talking about and making it real for participants? participants, right? So that you can count and build and that we can count on you to get there. Well, I'm glad that the term demand signal has come up a few times now. Everybody's favorite word these days or term, because we really do, as you just noted, Mark, we have a record demand signal right now. So we have record amount of money, but I think what our listeners might be interested in understanding is how we turn that record amount of money into a record number of deliveries and actually getting into this process, where the holdups are. So I'm just curious where each of you thinks in the supply chain, where the most work needs to be done, because we're playing a hard catch-up game in some ways. Well, I mean, I can't speak for the entire system, but from the Voyager perspective, obviously there's financial constraints, there's factories. And first and foremost, and we talked about a little bit beforehand, was multi-year funding to give industry the confidence that when they make investments of their own, it's going to pay off in the longer run. That's key. And then the second piece, and I'm glad you talked about it, is as we change in the character of war in the terms of the requirement side, we have exquisite, very expensive munitions. We want to introduce a complement of less costly munitions and rely on that as a broader portfolio across our arsenal. How do we qualify those lower-end? So the qualification piece from the industry perspective needs to be at speed. There's going to be some risks involved in this, but we have to be able to qualify the lower-end, the lower-cost munitions quickly and also give the assurance to these lower-end companies that we're going to be able to qualify the lower-end companies that what they're doing is worth the investment. I think that's right. There's an entire supply chain that is dependent upon us no longer taking a laissez-faire tact towards industry engagement and industry funding all along the energetics, munitions supply chain. The fact that we let our last nitrocellulose or major nitrocellulose feedstock provider in Tennessee shut down, right? I mean, the Army did a great job. They bought up all the feedstock. They've got perpetual agreements to take everything that they've got. But the fact that that facility is going to shut down because it's not profitable or non-economic, it's not okay, right? I mean, we need those underlying HMX and RDX capabilities. We need the underlying feedstocks. We need the people to process them and then refine them. We have to establish things that actually produce for our military. And I think that's where the strategic capital initiative, that's where GoCos and co-investment can make a huge difference because these capabilities are cost competitive at scale, but we're just not letting anything get to scale. Instead, over the last 20 years, we've had our AS9100 castings and shops in the United States go from a count of 400 to 100, right? The rebuild that we're doing right now is one where you actually have to incentivize a economic opportunity that is driven by military demand so that we can get to that point of the scaling where the revolution flips and it's self-propelling. And that's the work that Army, Mark, y'all are doing, right? To just get that first revolution all the way around so that we can start the spin. But the demand signal, I think the demand signal is clear. It just has to get proliferated across the supply chain. We could talk about critical minerals. There was a fight from 2021 through 2024. Do we build a neodymium? Iron boron magnet facility for the military alone? Or should we just let industry sort it out? And they just stared at their navels the entire time wondering what they should do. A hundred million dollar plant is a rounding error on our budget. It's a rounding error on our military budget. Do the GOCO and do the industry initiative. Those things should be aligned. When we started building the RCA, we were like, oh, we're going to build a neodymium arsenal of freedom that you mentioned, Mark, the arsenal of freedom, the first ship builds got done in 1936, not a day, not on December 8th, not a day after Pearl Harbor, we were building for years. So the fact is that this needs to be a whole of nation effort to reinstitute an industrial base, get it to scale, use super intelligence and automation to make it cost competitive. And that's where strategic capital, I think, is so important. You know, where that 100 million is not a rounding error, right, is in our national security. You're 100% correct, right? It is in the context of gigantic numbers, which has taken me, you know, a minute to get used to in the building, like just how, does anybody care about $100 million? Well, I do, but I'm not sure anybody else does. It's really incredible. But the impact of that 100 on our national security, and I do think, and I'll mention, we'll talk just a bit more about strategic capital. But one of the things too, I think that is catching up with us, right, or that is coming to account is when we have offshore jobs, manufacturing specifically, right, that is a trade-off to the arsenal democracy. I don't think we realize it as we do it. And I'm not necessarily talking about call centers, not discounting call centers. Call centers are wonderful, great businesses, right? But the reality, right, when we move manufacturing outside the United States, even though, hey, today it doesn't make X, which we might need for something, it takes away our capacity. right, our capacity to build things. In addition to jobs, I think jobs are very important things, but our ability to control, and I think, you know, this is some of the work, Brina, that you and the team do that I think has been so important and critical about helping everybody understand the ecosystem supply chain dependencies and where some of our dependencies have been, especially as we saw through COVID and other places where we have, you know, with the right set of circumstances, we're going to be in trouble, right? Because we don't have dominion and control over certain components of, you know, all the pieces that you talked about, right, that go into making things, and we haven't really talked about compute yet, right, in terms of our ability, because the future, you know, our ability around superintelligence and the demand of compute, what is required to produce that, this kind of insatiable curve we're on, we, there's so much more work to do to bring that on shore, if you will, and to have our own control or dominion over those outcomes, which are national security imperatives. That's the stuff, you know, that what keeps you up at night, that's what keeps me up at night. And if I can, just for a second, describe strategic capital. So, you know, in the 1.5 trillion, it's a really big number, right? But as you and I were talking, it's not 1.5 trillion, right, in the same way people are thinking about it. So, in that, in the 1.5 trillion, the Army's proposed share of that is 255 billion. Okay, that's still a lot, right? But it's also not, because guess what? You have to pay soldiers. You have to feed and house soldiers. And one of the things that was interesting for me, even though I kind of expected it, we were talking about the pawn process in our support group earlier, was the reality of the flexibility of that number, meaning most of it's baked, like most of it's committed, right? So, the ability, though, to then have a portion of it to then drive innovation or change is very, very small. In addition to then, right, in a good way, and I'm for this, right? I love our country. I love our democracy. I love that it's hard, that we have to agree to make change. But, you know, appropriations and how they work, but within that set, right, there's not a lot of money flexibility. It's not like you really start over every year and go, I'm going to go do this now. So, one of the things that we've done within our title authority as the Army and our Title X authority is taking a different look at the Army kind of as a platform. One of the things that then-Secretary Dan Driscoll and I talked about when we first started working together is what if we thought about, you know, the Army and the Army's assets, right? And not talking about our soldiers, warfighters, family. Which are extraordinary, right? Just talking about the things underneath it, right? The things that we do to properly resource them. And one of the things the Army has more of than we really, quite frankly, know what to do with, right, is land. We have 35 to 40 million acres of land, right, that's underperforming, non-performing. And so, we were kind of thinking about it as what is it, you know, how do we think about this as an underperforming, non-performing asset? And again, not people, right? Not soldiers, not families, but the assets we have in place. So, in our title what we're doing is through enhanced use lease agreements, right, are creating value out of non-performing or underutilized assets. So, for example, in Fort Bliss, Texas, we're building a data center, right? We're doing it with outside private investment money. We, in exchange for the land, we're getting compute as well as perhaps other things. We're also doing rare earth mineral processing. We're doing some energy projects. So, but we're basically taking our assets that we have under our control or under our domain, converting those into value and then going back into, you know, a set of the priorities for our country, right? Compute minerals. And so, we're, in addition to then working with Congress to make certain we get the right palm, the right appropriations, we're also bringing in private investment, bringing in and creating additional growth in the industrial base and participants to solve some of the problems. So, we're trying to do it, you know, with things that we can control as well. Matter of fact, down in Pueblo, Colorado, we established Voyager American Defense Complex down there. It's a great facility where we're building. We cut the ribbon in February and we are building something. solid rocket motors today. And that's how we're tempted to close the gap. And, you know, what we're trying to do at Voyager, if I could pitch in really quick, we're trying to combine a strict quality control with a fast turnaround. You know, we range from research all the way to serial production of the team, formerly Estes Energetics. Voyager acquired those guys, a lot of brains, a lot of brains on the science, the chemistry, the physics on solid rocket motors. And the goal is a qualified domestic capacity to address what our country needs. You know, solid rocket motors play such a huge role. They're in so many different advanced munitions because they're storable. You can keep them around for 10 to 20 years and you may crack that and use those weapons at any time. They're also used in divert and attitude control systems for satellites and some of the advanced exquisite interceptors. So it's a big, it's a big game. Our goal is high volume production. Okay. The facility there in Pueblo is key for that. It's also key back to what you mentioned, Brandon, is, you know, is a vertical integration we see is foundational here. So we're not dependent on foreign sources. Originally, Estes Energetics used to get its, its energetics from Namo, Norwegian company. Okay. There's obviously some risks. Namo's a great company, but there, we may not be their priority. Okay. But we can, by in-housing that, it reduces risk. Additional area is America had no production of black powder. What are you like, you gusts, like, what are you talking about black powder? This isn't just for civil war reenactment. Black powder, believe it or not, is on every single fuse. A initiator to detonation is a very consistent, it's not a lot of, it's a lot of it, but it's used on a very wide variety of munitions. All that stuff we've brought back to the United States for the purpose of closing our defense gaps. I'm glad you brought up the, the physics and the chemistry, because I was hoping you could all explain to me, how exactly do we build a solid state rocket motor? Can you tell us? I think you've got the wrong guy for that. I, but, but I, I do really want to talk about the critical minerals piece, which, which you've all brought up recently, just a little bit, just to throw out a couple of things I heard. One, you know, my understanding is that based on some research, one in 10 tier one suppliers to the primes are actually Chinese owned. That's one, one number I've heard. You can, I mean, Brandon, you would know that you do this for a living, whether that's true or not. And also we know for a fact that we have two major dates coming up. Now we don't know what's going to happen, but we know that in November, the Chinese suspension of certain export bans on, on critical minerals is set to expire unless it's renewed. And so, and perhaps it will be renewed, but the question on some of our minds is, you know, if China were to flip the switch either now or in the future, now, or in some sort of a future high-end fight, what that would mean for our munitions production. And so what I'm interested to hear from, from you guys is really how do we diversify with that in mind, with that pacing threat, the possibility that we could potentially lose access to critical minerals. What do we do now? So I was involved with the last critical minerals negotiation. So I worked with Dr. Navarro, Secretary Lutnick, Ambassador Greer, and I worked with Dr. Navarro, Secretary Greer, and I worked with Dr. Navarro, Secretary Lutnick, Ambassador Greer, worked in multiple sessions through what the consequences of those critical minerals shortages would be. The first thing I would say is if we prioritize our military systems, we have plenty of critical minerals. I'm actually not worried about China's ability to actually hamper our defense capacity. We can buy enough critical minerals from China. We can buy enough critical minerals from foreign source or even domestic source and refine them and manufacture them and manage them here in the United States to cover our military and defense industrial base complex needs. So when we think about it, look, I mean, in World War II, you had tin drives. You had things where people were rationing certain types of materials that were utilized across the supply chain in defense systems. I don't think that that's totally wacky of a concept if you're actually in a conflict. But, you know, China can't stop us from producing patriots. And, you know, even through the China critical minerals bans that were put in place, I mean, they stopped us from getting antimony. They stopped us from getting germanium. They stopped us from getting lots of things for long periods of time. They put in place bans. They put in place export control licenses that were tantamount to bans. They were asking the distributors in the United States that they were selling to. Or even in Europe that were distributing to U.S. suppliers, they were asking them questions about end use to try to stop them from being able to make their way into rocket motor or into, you know, a liner or whatever. Right. So I think that, you know, China does have a weapon to force us to ration, but not a weapon to force us to stop production. I mean, if you look at what we've done, you know, prior to 2023, we were producing like 300 patriots a year. Right now we're at 650 patriots a year. We're going to be ramping to 2000 patriots a year. Like, you know, people cast a lot of doubt and shade, but every time they do, they sort of take a number, you know, that we're at. So like, for instance, of the 650, about 325 go to allies, 325 stay. So people only count the 325 that we keep. We get into a conflict, we're keeping all 650, right? Then people, you know, don't, don't take into account that we've gone from 300 to 650. That's a ramp. So if you looked at that ramp and you propelled it in the future, by the way, a lot of that ramp has been incentivized by the investment tactics that this administration, this army, this Navy, I mean, Navy with SM3s as an example, that this administration has taken, those steps have been the cause of the ramp. If you take the ramp at any moment in time and you propel that in the future, I mean, damn, we can make 5,000 of these things a year. I think that, again, coming back to what China can do and can't do, they can't stop us from producing munitions and energetics and having not just, not just the ability to fight wars. We can fight the Iran conflict all we want. We could fight small regional wars all we want. We're trying to build an arsenal of deterrence, not just an arsenal of combat. And that's a bigger number, especially when you look at the Indo-Pacific. And I think that we're going to accomplish that if we stay on our current trajectory. If we don't, you know, then we'll kind of bounce back to the laissez-faire way that it was happening for, you know, 30 years prior. So I don't think China can stop us from producing systems. What China can do is they can stop us from making great cars. They can slow down data centers. They can slow down a lot of our underlying industrial base. And that's what I was really seeing in the conflict around critical minerals. And secondly, I think China can stop us from making great cars. They can slow down a lot of Secretary Lutnick said this brilliantly. He said, are we trading or is this a blockade? Are we at war? He's just blunt and he's right. Unless we're at war, we're trading. This is a free and fair and open market. You got non-market economies that want to put a constraint on that, that want to strangle that. Guess what? We could stop them from flying planes. We could stop them from making polymers. We could stop them from producing electric vehicles. There's a lot of stuff we could stop them from doing. This is not asymmetrical. There's quite a symmetrical requirement from an economic and production capacity with China. You said the thing about the Chinese ownership of underlying suppliers. One in 10 is fantastic. Right? That's just not accurate. The thing is, there are a bunch of critical underlying components, underlying materials, underlying refinement capabilities that go back to China that we can't live without. That's really the problem. It's not that it's one in 10. It's probably more like one in 60. But the fact is those one in 60, they're like supply chain attacks. Right? I mean, they found a really, really niche, really necessary, really critical part of our supply chain and they bought it. They bought it, owned it and put our people out of business. This is where it goes back to what Mark said. Production capacity in the United States is actually a weapon. Mark, you mentioned some of the initiatives that the army has for that sort of diversification and resilience in the supply chain. Are there any specific to critical munitions or the munitions supply chain that you would highlight? A component of it, so certainly in a direct way from a minerals perspective, yes, from a processing standpoint. One of the things that also, I think, just to introduce and it'd be interesting to get your perspective on and everybody's perspective on is I think for the most part, what I'm seeing and thinking a lot about, I was asked this question last week in New York. I was in a fireside with some of the big banks and kind of Wall Street and what do you see as the future? And we were talking about the 1.5 trillion, but once you get inside of that, really, where are the demand signals? And part of this to me is also very simple and it's some of the work you've been doing Brandon on super intelligence, but compute. So stay with me for a second. So we talk about the components of fires or exquisite fires. We talk about the chemistry, the minerals. One of the things that's interesting to me too, and this is where we've seen asymmetrical activity with China and others. We know for a fact, this isn't like the tinfoil hat club that meets probably after the Palm support group. We know, for example, that our adversaries are stirring the pot around data centers in communities. Part of it's real, part of it's absolutely people, "Hey, I don't want a data center or we also know that part of that energy is through our adversaries because data centers are power projection." And then if you think about data, perhaps as an intangible asset, ultimately, the expression of that tangible asset, ultimately, the expression of that tangible asset, ultimately, tangibly is a successful fire, right? So it's both the actual chemistry of the weapon, but it's also the production of that data, to me, at the very beginning that informs all that. And then how do we then go do that, right? So it's energy, it's chips, it's all the components. So to me, I start at the very basic level of superintelligence, compute, the capacity of compute, all that goes into that. And then how is it transitioned and expressed to those who build munitions? So, you know, in a very specific, tangible way, yes, we're looking at minerals and through enhanced use-lease agreements, we are taking some control of that. You know, a big part of this too, that we're making this healthy is in these agreements, right, through our strategic capital initiative, government is a client, but not the only client. Because one of the things that we found that we want these relationships to be stable and healthy is to have a mix, right? So it's a combination of these two things. So it's a combination of these two things, right? So it's not these peaks and valleys or the valley of death that certain, especially earlier stage companies, less mature companies can't survive. So we're trying to smooth that out for people. But I also think much of this comes back, and I know it's a little different than kind of how we frame some of this. I think so much of this comes back to some of the very basic fundamentals. And to me, that's compute and capacity. Then everything underneath that, though, that does kind of feed back into, you know, rare earth supply, power, other things to make that, make what we need a little bit easier. And so I think that's one of the things that, you know, we're going to be working into our success in munitions and what we'll need on a, you know, go forward or future basis. I want to pitch in really quick on the, you know, the concerns about China sourcing or China. Just look at the, look at the lesson learned from Europe on reliance on Russian gas. Okay. They want to trade day to day, but then there's a conflict and boom, they have massive leverage over the entire continent. Okay. Do we have that, that criticality with China right now? I agree, probably not. But I think it's a good idea. I think it's a good idea. However, comma, we need to ensure that any aspect of not only what China would give us, but what countries are influenceable by China and how would that affect us? Okay. That is, we have to be rock solid on that so that America can do these things on our own in times of certainly when we're trading, but also in times of crisis. And that's something that Voyager is very focused on doing things in America for America, not dependent on others. I was just going to say it's also proxy wars, right? So it's China, it is the ecosystem of China, right? Our and, you know, the reality is, I was thinking about this, we were talking a little bit about past conflicts. I mean, you know, part of what's interesting about our just extraordinary nation is that, you know, the conflicts that happen, there's kinetic activity somewhere in the world every single day. But the beauty of this country, the greatness of this country and the freedom of, you know, that we all enjoy is that it's somewhere else, right? So we get to wake up every day, you know, drop kids off at school, go about our business, see our friends, work, you know, build things, great jobs, live this beautiful life. And the price of that and the cost of that is this vigilance you talked about, right? And part of it sometimes, right, in this beautiful country we've built, because it's far away, we don't always think about it and recognize it. But much of what we're talking about today is really preserving that, right? And the other thing that you talked about that made me think about this is, you know, I will bet on the American people every single time. And so when, like, for example, you talked about like 10 shortages or other things, one thing that our adversaries always underestimate, and I think that they get lost in, you know, freedom of speech and democracy and the fact that we can debate openly and publicly is that in a moment's notice, right, and you've seen through past conflict or, you know, the terrible attack of 9-11, other things, is that we can be one people so fast, right? So don't discount what, you know, our ability to debate feeding into the fact that as needed or if needed, we will come together and do whatever it takes to maintain our freedom and win. Like, let's go, right? So part of this, though, is we will do the things necessary to we will then do whatever, right? We'll stop doing a thing or we'll contribute to something. China has the world in debt bondage. I mean, if you look at Zambian copper right now, it's like it is a Chinese asset. It is not a Zambian asset. The fact is their extraterritorial control of global critical minerals is really extremely problematic. And really, all I'm saying is on the very narrow topic of munitions, we can prioritize and we got enough for that. It doesn't mean we have enough for EVs. It doesn't mean we have enough for, you know, the grid that doesn't. There's a lot of stuff that suffers if, you know, we don't resolve this critical minerals issue with China, both from like a long-term productive capacity in the United States or with her allies or resolve it with China, which I have faith that the president and the trade negotiators that work with them are going to figure out a path forward and are going to do it both by gaining American independence from China and ensuring that we have capacity from China as necessary, right, for some of the non-critical industries. You're absolutely right. I mean, the thing and it's fantastic to hear the ramp rates you're talking about for missile production. My only thing is that needed to happen five, ten years ago to be where we really need to be, you know, because when you think about it, we have been embroiled in 20 plus years of a land centric coin fight. We built to that fight and then slowly we emerged with a new strategy about China. But did we flip the switch on industry and make him go that direction that fast? Maybe not. You know, yes, in some of the big cases where, by the way, you know, airplanes are sexy, ships are sexy, tanks are sexy, but munitions production, maybe not as sexy. It's really sexy if you're the commander that needs to fire him. If you're the guy that getting saturated by air ballistic missiles and cruise missiles and things come in your direction, it's really sexy. But the point is, though, is that we took risk in those areas. Several of the palms that I built back in the, you know, the 15, 14, 15 palms took some risk in those munitions things. That's that's a matter of fact, you know, in the army side, the army reduced Patriot air defense brigades to build up, you know, forces that are capable of handle the country's fight at that time. And we're living, we're living with that now. And so the fact and we're absolutely on the right track. We've turned the dial up, but it's going to take time to produce those things and we need to produce them. And we need to sustain that. I mean, the conflict has has given us some certainty, but I wouldn't count out our midterm low cost interceptor initiatives. So like we need that. Yeah, that's right. And I mean, voyagers are for four plus million a pop. That's right. Right. And then when the cost would it cost to generate that that inexpensive ballistic missile or cruise missile that we're employing them against is far less. We're on the wrong side of the cost equation. That's totally. I mean, the only thing is, you know, this isn't going to all fall to drone swarms like safety. Drone fuses are still a problem. And like China might not care about that, but we care about, you know, warfighter safety. So we have to make sure that like that's done right at the same time. You know, and if you send me three million drones and I can shoot down 90 percent of them or, you know, get killed 90 percent of the swarm, you still have 300000 drones coming at me. You know, that's going to do a lot of damage. But those are going to hold, you know, 100 pounds of explosives like the the missiles that we fire have like what, a thousand, two thousand. Pounds of explosive capability like we can still do a lot of damage with missiles and like missiles and ground combat systems. People are like, oh, it's all dead. It's not. They're fit. They're going to be faster. They're going to be easier to maintain because we've got right to repair, which is another thing the army has been leading on. We've got right to repair and we've got additive manufacturing that lets me to like lets me reproduce faster. So I don't need a tread that can go 5000 miles. And by the way, if you have a Bradley that's trying to run 5000 miles, you've got a bigger problem than the Bradley track pad track shoe. We should be able to replace them every thousand miles, every 2000 miles pretty easily. And we should have supply chains that can extend like that. And this is where we come back to the point that you just made on compute mark. Compute is actually an unlock for multiple things. Compute can be an unlock for creating AI environments in which we're doing testing. That's fulsome. And if we can prove that an AI environment can test the dynamics of a low cost interceptor, can test the dynamics of an energetic of an explosive accurately against real conditions, which you need a lot more data to do it. And we need all of the folks like, you know, I think the knack are trying to do this, where they're trying to pull together all of the major, you know, munitions suppliers and get them to feed a ton of data in about what it looks like to have, you know, these fires happen in range. If you if you can cut out range time, and you can show that you can get an accurate AI assessment, and you can speed up that process to the warfighter into testing on range, man, we'll be we'll be cooking with gas. So I think compute gets us there. I think compute gets us better, more automated supply chains, right? If we can make it so there's a much smaller density of how much can be produced it for per each, you know, five foot length of of production capacity or manufacturing line, you know, that's a big jump. What these two guys are doing here, what Mark is doing, getting the money out of it, is a big jump. And I think that's a big jump. And I think out in strategic ways, and what Gus is doing, building these actual systems, it will all benefit from tying together the idea of both the underlying investments into the critical minerals and all of that, and this idea that compute can help us to speed up a lot of the problems that we've got today. Yeah. And I would just add, I think your point was very important as well. I mean, one of the things we've talked about is, and just to put a very fine point on it, because I do think it really matters, is we need both, right? So we need compute as an underlying asset, right, to inform, but we need different types of fires and munitions, right? Everybody's gotten super excited about unmanned and drones. That's great. Part of me, in the back of my mind, is always that's pulling us off of our center or our power position a little bit. And so while we need a balance, and to your point, it's bad math to fire a million dollar thing at a $10,000 thing at some point, right? But we don't want to lose our position of strength and power. And so it's not an either or for me. Right. And that's part of this from a budget standpoint and a resourcing standpoint. We have to maintain our position of strength and continue to grow and develop that and outpace people and also, you know, fight the fight that makes sense with the right tools and resources for our warfighters. But it's not one or the other. And I always think about counter, like what's our counter to everything? So you think about asymmetrical conflict, right? I was speaking about AI, you know, to a group and I'm like, what's our counter AI strategy? At some point, what's your counter intelligence? There you go. It's super intelligent. It is super intelligent. Yeah. We're going to blow them away. But my point is like everything has a counter, right? So what's the counter to, you know, to unmanned? I mean, so we've got to think about it in what's great for us, right? Is that we're best positioned to win that, but we have to resource it the right way and be effective in doing it. Yeah. And I think you're spot on about the, it's not either or, it's with the exquisite munitions. But let's think like defensively for a second, you know, yes, we the same thing applies on the offensive side. Just an example, I was just talking to one of the squadrons that's come back from the fight in the Middle East, the F-16 squadrons, and the top drone killer is a guy with 18 drone kills with his F-16. Of that, he probably used about 80% of the APKWS rockets, right? Around 40 grand a pop versus the million dollar AIM-9 or AIM-120, right? And fortunately, they are on the right side of the cost exchange there, but we're not on the right side of the cost exchange in a lot of ways. But the exquisite munitions, those things that really punch, that have to have the survivability and the lethality, that's deterrence. But in addition to that, we also need the lower end, more affordable munitions for the mass involved. The thing that we've seen in the Iran fight that's very interesting is, yes, we can defend military targets pretty well, but bad adversaries will open up the attacks against civilian infantry. We can defend military targets, but bad adversaries will open up the attacks against civilian infantry. And you talk about our partners over there in the Middle East, our Saudi friends, our Emirati friends, when their airports are attacked, when their civilian malls are attacked and things of that nature, it's a whole different game, okay? And so, finding ways to affordably defend civilian infrastructure along with our classic military piece is crucial because these partners need our help. And so, in the munition space, in all of this space, we have to address this because that's the nature, sorry, the character of war is changing, you know? And I'm not saying we'll get rid of it, but I'm not saying we'll get rid of it, but I'm not saying we'll get rid of it, get into that same situation in the China fight, but it's the reality in the Middle East right now, and that's the fight that we are in. The other side of that, right, and even though, you know, show me a budget, I'll show you your strategy, but like if you're an adversary, like we publish our budgets, right? So, we kind of know where things are headed, right? I mean, so part of that is, you know, it's not, I mean, people are investing in like just like we are and predicting, but at some point, we tell what we're doing. You know, it'd be cool as you're building out this palm, show the level of investment you've got from ground to ground. I think they say at the Army. I can't remember. I think Air Force says molecule to something, but Air Force is always a little bit, you know, but the Army says ground around. We say things that confuse us all sometimes. That's right. No one knows. Sounds good, because we don't know. Just showing those investments from ground to ground and publishing that so people can see what that looks like in the palm. You know, you talk about stimulus, the $50 billion orders that, you know, you and the president put out into Raytheon, Lockheed, that's going to go downstream. You know what I mean? There's a bunch of companies that are feeding off that ecosystem. Now, they need some help in qualifications, right? We've got to get faster qualification processes out there ASAP to get those production lines from warm to hot. But that's demand signal. Hey, listen, you guys are awesome. We can keep going forever. And I'll have you back on to talk about cost exchange ratios, AI driven testing and evaluation, a lot of good topics here. But for now, thank you all for joining. Thank you for listening to CogSense. Don't forget to sign up for our free newsletter that comes out every other week, warntherocks.com/cogs-of-war. 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