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- [00:00]
Justin
Second breakfast Friday, March 6th. We're six days into this war. We have Frank Kendall on, who served as the 26th Secretary of the Air Force from 2021 to 2025. Oh, Brian has joined us, so we're going to have a full house today. Alongside Justin and Eric, Frank has a new book coming out called Lethal Autonomy the Future of warf. We have not read it yet, so we will be talking about that maybe on a second show later this year. But I think perhaps to kick us off, we can start with what themes the first week of this conflict in Iran has illustrated about the state and potential future of the defense industrial base.
- [00:57]
Frank Kendall
Well, sure, we're ages ago. Don Rumsfeld, I think, says, you go to war with the force, you have something to that effect. That's generally the case. You stockpile ahead of time. If you're in a long conflict, of course you can order things. Ukraine has been dealing with a situation where they've had to adopt very significant changes in warfare very quickly. So basically the situation we have is we have a force that's spread around the world, that's very large, has an enormous amount of capability, but it does have finite stocks to some things. The war has gone pretty much as I would have expected. We achieved some degree of surprise. We were able to take out a lot of the higher value targets, including, of course, the leadership immediately. And in the first few days, I think we prosecuted targets that were generally fixed targets that we do about ahead of time and complain for ahead of time. We're moving into a very different phase right now. The leadership has been alerted, the country's been alerted, they've distributed their assets as much as they can. Some of them are hardened, some of them are just concealed. There may be decoys out there. So we're now in a more difficult phase where we're going to be focusing more on tactical targets. There's an open question in my mind as to how much we should or will go after economic targets, things that are part of the infrastructure. Looks like we're doing some of that now too. We're certainly going after industrial base that supports their military and we can support all of this. The things that we would worry a little bit about the quantities of are first of all the precision longer range standoff munitions, which are pretty expensive. They're pretty exquisite devices, very specialized, built by our industrial primes that have a lot of experience doing exactly that kind of a product, because that's what we've demanded of them. As we get into this, using those against you know, a target you think is a truck might be carrying a missile or an individual shelter, it gets kind of expensive, so you want to shift to the shorter range, less sophisticated and much less expensive weapons like jdam, the Joint Air Munition. I can't remember what the acronym is anyway, it's a GPS guided bomb. We have a lot of those and they're relatively cheap, so we can keep this up for quite a long time. But the target sets now distributed in much less items of high value. If we have great intelligence, we may be able to find out where some of the leadership is still go after that, but we're going to be dependent upon really good intelligence to be able to do that. So, anyway, we're now in a situation which could endure. It depends a lot on what the political situation is in Iran and how prepared they are to cut a deal that Donald Trump will accept. My guess is he would accept a deal that basically he can state at least meet some of his objectives. He does not want a long war here. He campaigned on not getting us into or having long wars. So that's sort of our, you know, both sides, I think, are highly motivated to bring this to an end. But the Iranians can keep this going for a while if they choose to. There could also, of course, be a popular uprising and we could have an issue there. So I don't see our industrial base having a big problem with that. The President's going to have a meeting with CEOs, I think, today, as a matter of fact, and he'll encourage them to go faster. There's only so much they can do. Some of the newer entrants who've claimed a lot of flexibility and ability to do things very agilely, I don't think that's on the kind of timescale we're talking about here. We're talking about months at least. And for the major, more sophisticated weapons, it's a couple of years lead time. For less expensive ones, you could cut that down to a few months, probably assuming the supply chain can support you. It's not just the primes, of course. It's all the things that go into a weapon that have to be built and assembled to put it together. So that's a real quick rundown of the situation that I see it right
- [04:44]
Brian
now, Frank, before we hover back over the defense industrial base component, because I think this is where we're going to get our principal revelations. As somebody who's thought about strategic air power and has been in the corridors of power and understands how policymakers think through this. What's your best assessment about why the Iranians were surprised that this. The armada was coiled. The President was talking about it for weeks.
- [05:09]
Frank Kendall
Yes, the price has degrees, right? They were not entirely surprised, but they were not. They were still in negotiations. And people I talked to in the Middle east who worked with Iranians, they're very tough negotiators. Nobody likes to negotiate with the Iranians for some reason, but they were in negotiations. I don't think they've been given a clear indication that we were ready to go. I think we moved very quickly. I think some of the signs that they would have expected to see, particularly evacuation of people, there was a little bit of that, more voluntary than anything else. And some of the other things that are indications and warning is the phrase we use, that event's about to happen. We probably didn't provide them because we haven't done them. We were not as ready to do this as we have been for some other operations. And you can see that in some of the. I think there was an expectation that this would be a very quick decapitation attack, be a little bit like Venezuela, somebody would emerge to talk to us and agree to a ceasefire and give us what we wanted. And that hasn't happened. So we weren't ready either, in some ways, for what's developing here. And the Iranians, they brought their leadership all together and provided a very lucrative target. And I think that was the catalyst that encouraged apparently, Israel to convince the President that now was the time to go do this, and he went along with that. So I think they had some indications, some of the targets, they can't do much about their naval assets, for example. I mean, these are ships in port generally, you know, if they go into the. In the Gulf or someplace, or they're vulnerable, installations in general can be hit. So they hadn't done the things you would do if they'd have more tactical warning, disperse their forces, for example. Now they're. They're pretty constantly in a posture that's somewhat ready for war. And I think the reason we're seeing continued attacks coming out is that they didn't have everything on bases for us to target. They had a lot of stuff already in a sort of a fighting posture. And because of that, they're able to maintain this relatively continuous, up until now, at least, series of attacks on the US bases and on their neighbors and on Israel.
- [07:18]
Justin
I want to come back to the idea you just put forward of going from more strategic to tactical targets, because you've run out of the good stuff or the most juicy stuff to blow up. And okay, so say we get to a point where like all the missile launches are gone and they're not really. We're in a happy place two weeks from now where you don't have any. Like the drone threat is pretty much gone. You get like two ballistic missiles going off a day and then what? You're in this kind of awkward place from a perspective of only having air power. Right? Because like say you want defections, like where are people going to defect people to. Okay, say you don't have like the Kurds, like you know, conquer, conquer Tehran or you know, rolling themselves or the revolution doesn't start, you're just kind of stuck in this awkward, like, okay, I guess we can like escalate more by doing things which are kind of potentially awful and counterproductive, like doing, you know, energy and water and waste systems management. I mean, even if things go great, like we're going to hit the limits of air power pretty soon, I think.
- [08:31]
Frank Kendall
No, we're hitting them already. Yeah. I was in the Pentagon. I was a deputy defense deputy director of defense research and engineering for tactical warfare programs. Thirty or thirty odd years ago for the first Gulf War, we couldn't find Scuds. And I don't know that there's a single engagement where we successfully found a Scud on a mobile launcher and killed it before it was able to launch. The fundamentals of that really haven't changed. A truck's a truck, right? And you can, you know, keep it so it's not observable, bring it out when you think there's no airplanes around, when you have some confidence because your own sensors, there's no airplanes around, get a launch off and then hide it again. So we're going to suppress this threat, and we are. I haven't seen any good numbers on how many launches per day, but they're still getting off a mix of ballistic missiles and UASs and maybe some cruise missiles even so, the volume of fire they can generate is not decisive. I refer to it more as harassing fires. And that's kind of what it is. It's going to inflict some casualties, it's going to do some damage, but it's not militarily significant. Well, Frank, we're doing something on the other side of that coin, which is hunting things and killing relatively low value targets. That's not necessarily going to break the banks of the Iranian military. So the economy, on the other hand, we can bring their economy down pretty effectively. We can stop some of the services that you talked about. Internet's off, I think already. I'm not sure where power is in general, transportation networks, things like that. That's going to hur the Iranian people and it may be another impetus for them to rise up and do something about the government. But I don't know how much appetite to absorb that kind of punishment the country has as a whole. It's not a popular government and we just saw that. But it's also a ruthless one which has got the weapons and it's got the will to put down any kind of unrest. So that's all very, very difficult to predict. The other side of the coin is hard to predict too, because nobody in the Persian Gulf right now is enjoying the fact that weapons are coming into their country and attacking them. So it's in everybody's interest to get this over with and finish it somehow. But both sides have the capacity and the capability to continue it for quite a long period of time.
- [10:46]
Eric
Yeah, I mean, like, you know, 80 to 88, the Iranians proved the fact that they would at least persist, you know, if nothing else. And you're already seeing like Qatar today announce that they're going to shut off production because their storage facilities are capacity and they can't ship oil out of Qatar. So while there will be economic impacts to Iran that we can inflict, like, there's also pretty substantial economic impacts that can be inflicted on the Arab states as well by Iran just by continuing the fight. So it is one of those things that, like, I think.
- [11:19]
Frank Kendall
Let me.
- [11:20]
Eric
These are tax.
- [11:21]
Frank Kendall
Sorry, go ahead. That's a hugely important part of the political question on our side. Straits within our moves are effectively closed. Production is going down in general. The gas price is going to go up very quickly. That's a pretty responsive market when things change. And Donald Trump is campaigned on gas prices and just bragging about them. So you better be careful about what he says here on this. That will put a lot of pressure on our administration to bring this to an end as well.
- [11:50]
Brian
So now we're going to shift for. Oh, I was going to say we're going to do 45 minutes on political risk insurance from the Development Finance Corporation and talk about we're going to be the global underwriter of every haul in the Straits of Hormuz. But in all seriousness, Brian, you.
- [12:04]
Ryan
It's a good business. Yeah, it's a good business if you get into it. I was just going to make the point that Justin made is that they don't need to have very many launchers come out and periodically attack ships in the Persian Gulf or the Strait of Hormuz to basically close it off for all practical purposes. And that turns into a very challenging Scud hunt because there's a bunch of caves along the coastline. Bring stuff out and shoot and we can go and attack the caves afterwards. But it's whack a mole all over again. So we now have to maintain some kind of continuous air coverage over the Strait and the Gulf. And then we have to have shifts, probably escorting the tankers that are trying to make their way out, creating lots of juicy targets for the Iranians to engage. Because right now we don't have anything in the Persian Gulf to avoid giving them targets to shoot at. And that will change if we have to escort ships, which then drives the political calculus on our side. How many, because there will be ships that get hit. How many ship losses or ship damage are we willing to accept before we seek some kind of off ramp with the Iranians? So it seems like both sides are in a race against time from an economic perspective rather than a military perspective.
- [13:13]
Frank Kendall
That's a good point. This is all political and economic now more than military.
- [13:16]
Justin
I think the idea that Israel talking about bombing the instruments of oppression.
- [13:25]
Brian
Yeah.
- [13:26]
Justin
Seems to me to be a little far fetched. I don't entirely know how like blowing up various, like police precincts is going to stop organization that was able to successfully, you know, kill 30,000 people and put down a national protest is like all that relevant here.
- [13:48]
Eric
Well, that's, that's one of the hard things with like the Iranian structure.
- [13:51]
Ryan
Right.
- [13:51]
Eric
So you have the, the, the military force, you have the IRGC subset within the military. And then you have the besiege, which is that, that militia that can be called up and the way the IRGC kind of insulates itself from the rest of the military, while like the military and the national police are national and they move around. The IRGC specifically recruits in each province and they have forces that are from that province. So even in the Kurdish areas, even in the Turkmen areas, even in the Baluch areas, there are people who are from those areas that are members of the irgc, that operate in those areas that are relatively loyal to the regime because of just the history of support that they've received from them. That does actually make it hard and different from the Sunni, Shia, Kurdish dynamic that existed in Iran or in Iraq. And I think Iran actually learned a lot of lessons from that and watched the way that Iraq did it Poorly. And their regime intentionally tried to make sure they were more integrated into all of those outlying communities because there's really like seven ethnicities within Iran. And yet they've always been able to some degree hold them together in part because they made them all kind of part of the state.
- [15:08]
Ryan
The IRGC has a great. Is an economic tool as well. I mean, they run a lot of businesses. So the state of the IRGC is basically how you stay employed and how you can make money and employ your friends and family. So it creates this sort of flywheel where it's not just being recruited for the ideology, but you're being recruited because that's the, you know, the business in town.
- [15:29]
Eric
Yeah.
- [15:31]
Brian
To your earlier point about how do you engage the instruments of oppression, there's initial reporting, I can't confirm it, I haven't spent that much time over it, of the Israeli Air Force deliberately going over and striking concentrations of special police units and besieged militia that we sort of opened our conversation this morning by the shift from the strategic targets of ballistic missile infrastructure or nuclear chemical weapons facilities and moving down the target list to more tactical objectives. But now there are indicators that the segments of the Iranian state structure that killed 30,000 protesters in the last 90 days are now being hunted as well.
- [16:18]
Frank Kendall
I think that's an interesting approach. What I'm thinking about is how long and how much effort Israel had to put into Gaza and never completely defeated Hamas. The soon as you start doing attacks like that, those buildings are all going to be empty. You've got to go find the people and figure out where they are at that point when. When survival is the issue. People are very creative. They're not going to present targets unless they have if they can help it. So again, it's a little bit like what I said earlier about transition to much more tactical targets. As soon as you reveal what you're going to be coming after, that's going to be mitigated very quickly by the adversary.
- [16:58]
Eric
I mean, like, I think I saw a report yesterday that said something like the Majta Khamenei is, is the heir apparent. That's the ex Ayatollah's son, which obviously he doesn't have any other requ to be the Ayatollah, but whatever, nobody cares anymore because they've already done it once, so why not do it again? But they were even saying, like, all the meetings of their Supreme Council that's going to make this decision are all being done over the Internet. They're all being done through, like, teams meetings, which is its own type of hell. But yeah, so they're doing these long meetings now and they're not even meeting. Like they won't even meet in person. So again, we've already had layers of complexity because yes, Iran did. Iran was able to be decapitated because Israel had exquisite intelligence on where the leadership and high value targets were. And all of those high value targets had gone well, not going to trust anybody else anymore. I'm going to just go to ground and hope that we can continue to persist. And this kind of goes back to, you know, I don't understand why there wasn't or if there was. We just haven't seen it. There wasn't a movement to start a shadow government, a secondary, like something that could be a legitimized power structure that starts now doing all of the signaling because even, you know, Reza Pahlavi's son isn't coming out and saying like, I should be the leader.
- [18:19]
Brian
Now wait a minute, I thought he was sailing from elbow with a personal guard of a thousand men and he was going to depose the king.
- [18:28]
Justin
So Trump said this thing, it's like, oh yeah, we had a few names, but they all got, they all had a bad day on Saturday. Yeah, I would, I wouldn't be shocked if they had maybe had a little chat with one or two of those people and like they happened to be at the wrong place in the wrong time and it was just, just too exciting. There were too much adrenaline that all these people were meeting. So like we throw out like plan A of like okay, our man and our man in Havana. And then, you know, now we're just, now we're just winging it with the, with the farm team.
- [18:59]
Eric
Yeah, I mean, you know, right now you got Lair Johnny basically as the leader. That's, that's a pretty hard line guy. He's, he's been hardlined basically since forever. Unfortunately, it's been some of the semi moderates that have also been hit because they were the ones who came together. So you're getting more and more hardliners that are the ones that are left. So at least from the government standpoint, like we've made it more resistant to the thought process that we would have wanted to inculcate by doing these strikes. I would think.
- [19:33]
Ryan
Yeah, we're boiling it down to the most hardcore paranoid group that would never contact anybody electronically. Funnel rats only like it.
- [19:42]
Eric
Well, it's, it's a, it's, it's the ISIS problem.
- [19:44]
Frank Kendall
Right.
- [19:45]
Eric
So like ISIS as they, when ISIS was spread Across Iraq and Syria, there was actually some really good arguments that a lot of the people that were with them weren't the diehards. They were just like, ah, these are the guys that are in charge right now. Go along to get along as they got killed and whittled down. By the time you were at the very bottom of the Euphrates River Valley in Syria, you were dealing with like Uzbeks who had traveled on foot to get there to fight in a jihad. Like these are people who were not going to surrender. You kind of get the same thing, like once you start this, if they don't capitulate, you start whittling down the like, fringe and you're only left with the true believers at the end. And again, those are the ones who don't want to lay down their arms. They're the ones who are committing seppuku instead of surrendering to tie it back to another war that we fought at.
- [20:37]
Justin
Someone asked Frank a question. We're off the rails here. We have guessed, guys.
- [20:42]
Eric
Yeah. So Frank, I guess I have one. When you're talking about the defense industrial base and we're seeing the interceptors that we're using against like the Shahid drones and against the ballistic missiles, given the time that it takes, do you even think that the primes are going to start moving on, increasing the production of those, or is this already a sunk cost and we're going to get down close to a zero?
- [21:05]
Frank Kendall
That'd be our biggest concern. I think interceptors like Patriot and Thaad for example, right. Even standard missiles, there's a pretty good lead time to build those. I used to be the chief engineer for Raytheon. I know exactly what that's like. They will ramp up or we're going to pay them to do that, obviously. But there's a long lead. Time and again it goes back to all the supply chain. The people are building elements of the sensors with the sensors themselves and so on, you know, specific components, solid rocket motors, all those things that go into, into those missiles, We've got a reasonable stockage of those. We can do this for a while, but we've already been maximizing out those production lines to support Ukraine. Those are some of the same systems that Ukraine needs, as much of them as they can get. We have tried to field some lower cost things. We brought in our allies and partners to support Ukraine as well with some of the systems that they have, particularly some of the shorter range systems. So I don't see any kind of a crisis here. But I think at some point, not too far down the road, we'll have to be changing our shot doctrine. We'll take one shot instead of two. We'll watch where things seem to be headed, and if they're going someplace we don't care about very much, we'll let them go. It's called preferential defense. I think we'll do some things tactically to try to adjust. And as we're suppressing the numbers of threats, that helps too, of course. Right. So we've got to work this entire equation, the whole kill chain, all parts of it, to try to get the thrust out as much as we can. And one thing we can perhaps accelerate is some electronic warfare capability, which is relatively inexpensive and potentially you can more quickly field some prototype capabilities there that can help deal with some of these threats. But it depends a lot on whether there is even a vulnerability there. Is there a seeker that requires that's vulnerable, that emits radiation? So it's going to be. It can go on for a while. That's really my point. And I think both sides are going to be stressed and have difficulties delivering or defending as it goes on further.
- [23:08]
Ryan
Hey, Frank, do we kind of risk if this goes on for a while, learning the wrong lessons from this confrontation? Because you're going. We're up against a country that essentially has no air defenses at this point. They're. They lack really any industrial base to build anything new. So we're not dealing with an adaptive enemy. Right. So unlike Ukraine, where you see changes happening on the battlefield daily, if not weekly, here you're. We're just going to continue to pound them with the same old stuff we've always pounded people with. And the takeaway could be, well, we just need to build up more mass. We need to build up a larger stockpile of the same old stuff, including our precision munition, our, you know, Tomahawks and stuff are for munitions. And then we go up against a China, and then they've got countermeasures and they adapt. And now we build up a stockpile of stuff that turns out like Excalibur to be obsolescent.
- [24:00]
Frank Kendall
A great point, Ryan. I have watched over the last 20 or 30 years the US try to focus on the Pacific multiple times. And every single time we get pulled into the Middle east in some mess in the Middle east, there's more violence there ongoing year after year than anywhere else in the world. We also, of course, have the Ukraine, which has been an aberration. Right. It's the first time Russia's invaded anybody since Afghanistan. You're right. We talk a lot about our combat experience. It's largely been counterterrorism and things like this. We can put together an air package. We did this 30 some years ago. We could do it very well. We can go in and service all the fixed targets that we can identify that we think matters. That's not the China problem. The China problem is a fleet and an air force basically that's supporting it and a lot of long range rockets coming out of China, coming against our bases, coming against our adversaries and a much, much more formidable area to air set of capabilities than Iran or anybody else has, quite frankly. So no, this is another diversion. It is another type of conflict which we're very good at. We have an enormous amount of capability to have do this sort of thing, but it's not the fight we can expect in the future and we're waging it. Interestingly, the F35 is very much an element here, but most of the forces we're employing are the types of forces we've had forever. The point of my book that was mentioned earlier is that we're moving to an age in which automated forces, automated weapon systems are going to be the norm. And we've got to. We're kind of in a race with China to make that transition as quickly as we can. I couldn't say we were winning right now. I think we're close. I think that we're close to each other. It's going to be as much about culture change and will as it is about the technology and the ability to exploit the technology. And I'm nervous about that. I'm afraid that China will be more open minded than we are, more willing to make more significant changes and that as a result of that they'll make commitments and move faster and steal them. Our times.
- [26:06]
Ryan
Yeah. Ayan, I'm worried that we equate automated with dumb mass, right? So we say, oh, I can make unmanned systems and drones that are cheap and I can field them in large numbers, but if they're not really adaptable, your opponent's going to come up with a countermeasure. Also, there's no way we're going to outmass China, right. We're going to be the away team up against the world's largest manufacturing power. So we're not going to get a mass advantage. We've got to think about how would we circumvent what they do and that's going to require a, an industrial base that's able to adapt rather than industrial base that can just stockpile stuff.
- [26:41]
Frank Kendall
We have to make good decisions about what we buy. Going fast. Might talk about this in that article that was mentioned earlier. I think going fast in the wrong direction doesn't get you anywhere you want to go and it wastes time and money. Time is probably our most precious asset. So we need to take the time up front to think carefully about what we should be buying and then go get that. That's the point of my book, actually. The book is about fulfilling the thing that Bob Work, when he was Deputy Secretary of Defense, tried to do with what he called the third offset strategy. He felt that what we needed to do was another round of modernization that was a dynamic improvement or a generational improvement over what we had, as opposed to just an evolutionary get the next thing that's better than the one you already have, which has been our traditional route for the last few decades. And when I worked with Bob on that, we never finished the job. He basically came out and said, it's going to be about robots, it's going to be about robotics. And I said, well, that's fine, but that doesn't tell you what to build. It just gives you an idea. Robots do what the team that he had working on it with him, myself, Steve Welby, Assistant Secretary for Engineering, Aarthi Prabhakar from DARPA, Craig Fields, Defense Science Board, and Jimmy McStravik from my acquisition office, came up with a formulation that was range, quantity at cost and autonomy. It was that mix of things, right? The ability to operate from further away, fill things that were exquisitely expensive that you could only afford in small numbers, and introduce automation. I still think that's true, and I think it's true in all domains generally. And the book lays all that out. It talks about what we would actually do in each of those areas. And I know it's not the final answer. I'm sure there are a lot of things that are wrong in there, but at least it gives us some things to think about, moving in that direction. So, yeah, we're in a race. I've been worried about China since 2010 when I came back in after being out of government for 15 years, saw what they were doing to modernize. They're a formidable opponent and much more formidable, I think, than even the Soviet Union was. And now we're off dropping JDAMs in the middle east again.
- [28:48]
Eric
I think that brings up an interesting point to talk about. So right now there's a lot of talk about the Lucas and The success that the Lucas is having, and obviously that was like a Office of Secretary of Defense or Office Under Secretary of Defense R and E project that was able to grow out and become successful. Why are we not hearing about or seeing about all of our defense tech companies that are going to revolutionize warfare and their contributions in this fight like we are for the Lucas?
- [29:20]
Frank Kendall
I don't know. I think there's been a lot of hype there. There's a lot of bashing of the traditional industrial base, which I think is not warranted. The point of my CNS article you mentioned is that we get the products we ask for. The problem isn't the industrial base, it's the customer. If you tell the suppliers I want an F47, they're going to build you an F47. If you tell them you want a CCA, they're going to build that. They can build different kinds of products. You just got to tell them what to want. It's not like the commercial world where the industry comes up with products on their own and says, hey, do you want one of these? It doesn't work that way. And the bottom line is if we want things that are cheaper, simpler and easier to build, we've got to demand that. We've got to tell people exactly what we want. Some of the companies have been out building their own prototypes with the idea that I'll build it and you'll see how wonderful it is and then you'll buy it. That has not worked very well so far and it's not the first time. I used to do some venture capital work in this area where you'd have what you thought was a great, interesting thing operationally and it never made it on the priority list. The reality is the services, and I've done this from both the Secretary of Defense's office and from the Department of the Air Force. They don't have enough money for the things they already know they want. And they've got a long list of unfunded priorities that they'd love to have money for. So buying something that's not even on that list is hard. Getting them to do that is really hard if we want a substantial advantage. Now through the Cold War, we were looking for a significant technical lead over anything the Soviets put out. So we kept building better and better versions essentially of the things we were already building. For the most part, the biggest revolution was the introduction of precision munitions, stealth network forces, wide area surveillance centers that were in the first assault breaker thing that DARPA did. And they were in the follow on forces attack basket of programs that I managed at one point for the Pentagon. And that's what we brought into Desert Storm. That was the second offset strategy demonstrating its capabilities. Right. So that's 30 plus years ago. That's a long time. There's been a lot of technology development since then. And while people are moving in the direction of embracing some degree of autonomy pushed upon us in part by what we saw first with isis and then more so in the Ukraine and the Karbakh, moving forward but not letting go of the things that we already have. So we got to do a lot of deep thinking, quite frankly, about what we should do next. We got to be very smart about what we buy. We probably ought to hide it from China for a while so they don't know what we're doing and get onto the technologies that are largely coming out of the commercial world. But Frank, they're available to everybody.
- [32:12]
Ryan
Can I push back on that a little bit? So if these technologies are coming out of the commercial world, that means they're pretty well available to everybody. So if we're going to try to get a game changing advantage over an opponent using technology that is largely available to everybody, seems like it's a recipe for falling behind. So do we need to think instead about creating an industrial base and a military that is able to adapt and kind of like what we see in Ukraine with the move, counter move competition that's happening, rather than trying to come up with that next leap forward?
- [32:48]
Frank Kendall
There's no magic in that either, Brian. It's always good to have flexibility and adaptability. It's always good to be able to do that. So some of that is industrial based developments that are also relevant in the commercial world. One of the things that's happened in the defense side of the house, probably more slowly than in the commercial world, is embracing of an integrated design and production environment. Model based system engineering is the buzzword we hear about a lot and that's been around for several years now. Right. And adopting some of the AI technologies for coding in particular, we can produce software. And software is kind of an exception to the hardware things we've been talking about. Right. You can do it fast and you can mass produce it very quickly once you've got it. So being ahead on that side of the equation is very helpful, which can give you a big advantage in the cyber world and in the electronic warfare world. Right. RF systems in particular are digitally controlled and almost all the functionality is digital only. The actual active radiation basically. And receiving the Radiation is still non digital. So yes, there are areas in which you can do that. You gotta be again, smart about it and think through carefully. Other areas which involve more traditional manufacturing, it's a little harder to do and you're still gonna have to deal with lead times. And if you don't do significant quantities, you're not gonna build the production capacity that you need. We've been spending a lot of time recently on fixing, quote, the industrial base. I'm on a study with Council on Foreign Relations. There's another one that Atlantic Council's doing. There's some things coming out of Dodd Dow if you want, but the resources are always going to be limited and you've got to go to things that you think it's going to really make an operational difference. If you make adjustments and pay for capacity you're not using in peacetime. Industry is not going to do that for you unless there's an incentive. I'm aware of some discussions between some of the Primes and the Deputy Secretary of Defense to try to get industry to build greater capacity. And the approach I think they're taking is that industry has some essentially assurances of future production. And if that production doesn't manifest itself, then industry will get its capital investment back. It's a kind of a clawback provision. I think that's viable if we get the Congress to agree to it. As is often the case with the Congress, they're very reluctant to commit future funds right beyond the current year. No business could get by operating that way. You have to make longer term investments, you have to make commitments and you have to have flexibility about how you execute because things change. Our system is designed to be very rigid and it really gets in the way of that kind of flexibility.
- [35:28]
Brian
Frank, if I can build on this theme for a moment, maybe three to four minutes ago you said, hey, that there's a substantial amount of criticism directed to the Primes and it's not particularly fair. And I think that's absolutely correct. That in my line of work in private sector, I hear the Primes referred to almost like genies or vampires, that they're like supernatural creatures that are operating, trading out there that are dead set on destroying American war fighting capacity. That's obviously nonsensical, but there's an interesting tension and you just elevated it in this discussion about the Deputy Secretary of Defense work with the Primes for longer term commercial offtake agreements and clawback provisions. There's an interesting interaction that you just elevated related to this. Do you feel that the Senate Armed Services Committee, the House Armed Services Committee and some of the other segments of Congress are sufficiently sophisticated. Do they have the necessary staff? Do they have the resources available to conduct effective oversight and drive more intelligent negotiations by and among the very the six primes. And the principal purchaser, like Congress, doesn't have a great track record in supervising issues of war and peace right now. But do they have the ability to put pressure on this absolutely vital issue of what is the DIB and how do we fix it?
- [36:54]
Frank Kendall
I think it can be done. My general. I've dealt with all of our committees for a long time and I think both sides of the aisle and those committees are pretty. They work together reasonably well compared to other parts of the Congress. They all care about national security, they're all trying to do the right thing and they will listen to a reasonable argument. The place where there's the most resistance probably is the appropriators who are very reluctant to approve a multi year contract, for example. And these are not unsophisticated people. Now some of the key people there have changed recently, but I don't know the new team so much, but when holding onto and controlling how money is spent is your political power, you're reluctant to give that up. The authorizers are a little different. They basically are writing the rules and so on, and they have certain control over certain things. Their bill always passes because if it didn't, nothing bad would happen and people would notice. The flexibility there is pretty good. What I find to be a problem there though is that there's often a tendency to want to do something, just something, and they will accept bad ideas that sound good on the surface but actually don't work in order to put something up and say I did acquisition reform for the 99th time. We're getting a little bit of that now. And this is even on. There are some fairly unsophisticated attempts to throw money at things thinking that will solve the problem in some cases without having retired. The rush to Silicon Valley or to commercial tech, I think is a little bit of that. The DIU has been around for about 12 years or so now, I think. Think I'm not aware of a lot that's come out of DIU that's gotten filled, but yet they still. There's a lot of people very enamored of that idea that will give them another billion dollars a year and miracles will happen. One of the things that I tell people on the Hill and I've told people in OSD this nothing is fielded in the United States military until a service wants to buy it, period. And even if you have political control for a while and you can force things out of service for a while, as soon as you're gone, if they don't want it, they're not going to buy it. And I've had this happen to me personally more times than I can imagine. More times I can count going back to the 80s and 90s. Right. The services are enduring institutions, they have enduring priorities. So you really got to bring them along. And so if they're not fully involved at the senior level and they don't culturally accept what you're trying to do, it's not going to happen. You're going to spend money on it and then it's going to die. So I think people have to be much, much more aware of that. Trying to circumvent that system doesn't work. We don't have a system in which the acquisition technical side of the house can impose products on the military and I think rightfully so. I think what you need to do is grow officers who appreciate technology and are open minded about how it can contribute to war fighting and then have a partnership. When I was running the Air Force, one of the things I did for the department of the Air Force was try to create. This is part of the set of initiatives I called reoptimizing for great power competition. Create an ecosystem, if you will. It's a great Silicon Valley word that I use all the time to force the technologist and the operators to work together in partnership, force the analyst into the room so they could do the operational analysis of different options and lay out the data that would help people decide whether it was the right idea to do something or not a good idea. I had done an awful lot of that kind of in an ad hoc way when I was secretary because I didn't have that institutional structure in place to do it and people didn't have the missions necessary to do it as inherent missions. And we were fragmented and frankly we've been superior for 30 some years. We had assumed dominance ever since the first Gulf War. And I was watching it slip away as China modernize very effectively and, and very aggressively. So some of that has endured. Some of it is not. The cultural norms reasserted themselves after I left. Dave Alvin was my partner in this. He understood it, he was trying to do it with me. He's not there anymore. And instead of forming a command that would be the centerpiece of what I just described, they're devolving back to the four stars who control global strike mobility and fighters being back in charge of their empires, basically, which is unfortunate unless you look at things as an integrated whole, I don't think you're going to get the best solutions. Space Force is a little bit different. Space Force is very small. They can have their operators and their requirers work together very, very closely in a single organization. That's what we're headed for there. They can accomplish it. Both services can accomplish this almost independent of organizational structure. If you do things, you can facilitate it, you can make it easier, you can make it part of the culture more. But leadership matters far more than organizational structures does.
- [42:07]
Eric
Frank, when you were looking at those changes, how much of that is actually a joint discussion and the for instance I'll Give is the A10 being replaced by the F35 as a cast platform. Obviously the army was largely against the loss of the A10 just given one, its usefulness, but then also like its capability as a cast platform. How does that interplay and that friction also come, come to a head when you're having these discussions about modernization?
- [42:38]
Frank Kendall
We could spend an hour on this. I've been doing this since 1986, right. And I was always an advocate for innovation, advocate for, you know, new ideas, new concepts of operation as well as new technologies and so on. When in 1986, the year I walked into the Pentagon as a brand new young Sesame, Goldwater Nichols and Packard commissions, recommendations were adopted and we formed the undersecondary acquisition which some 30 odd years later I got to do, we formed the JROC, the Joint Resources Council Operational Council I guess. And the deal was that the acquisition professionals, the civilians largely would be in charge of how we bought things, how we structured programs, et cetera and program management and that the operators would be in charge of requirements. And so that was the deal done basically under Goldwater Nichols. The jroc, for all of my peer experience with it, and a lot of people tried very hard to make it effective, was largely a collection of people from the different services there to defend their services thing. It's a committee of people who are in the room not to figure out the best answer, but to make sure that that something doesn't bad happen to their service. And essentially all those services agree with each other's requirements all the time and they always did. And so we started out with a fairly short process to do that. And after 10 or 15 years or so, it became a year and a half. And so people had to go through this enormous bureaucracy to get approval requirement that was going to be approved. No matter what they did in reaction to that was back up their decision making. You had to wait for money program generally. So you have to put it in the budget and then you have to wait for it. So while you're waiting for your money, you can also do your requirements process and get that out of the way and get your contracting ready. So the actual delay of all this wasn't too great, but the bureaucracy was enormous and there was a cost to pose with it. That's gone now, and I'm not sure what's going to replace it. But I do think that the Joint Staff should be focusing on things that have joint impact, that matter in the joint work. And it should have people who are independent of the services enough to look at them objectively without just trying to protect parochial service interest. This is an idea of some kind of a general staff. People who are joints, they start in a service and then at some point they transition and they become joint for life, if you will. And they're no longer. They're allowed now to think independently and to be more creative and more open minded. That idea has never gotten any direction for reasons that are, I think, pretty obvious. There's some analogy to the German general Staff of World War I, but I don't think that that's really a fair comparison. It's not what we're talking about here. So there's that piece of it. There needs to be an incredibly strong partnership between the technical creative people and the operational people. And that's the only way it's going to work. And I've. I've seen it out of balance on both sides. There was a period after McNamara was secretary, way back in the era of Vietnam and beyond, where a guy who's really brilliant, one of my idols, Johnny Foster, ran R and E research and engineering for DoD for quite a few years. And at that point, and this was just dying in 1986, as I came into the Pentagon, the Secretary of Defense's office had enormous power over what the services did in their budgets. Enormous. As a brand new ses, I could withhold money from all the programs in the Air Force and the Navy, mostly that I was responsible for at the time and the army too. That went away pretty quickly and it's moved back and forth a little bit. But by and large, the services do control what they buy. And over time they certainly do. We need to reexamine all that. I think. I think Congress made a big mistake when it broke up. ATNL And I think that's generally perceived to be the case right now. You don't have a single person in charge of the entire life cycle of products and thinking about the planning for the entire life cycle from the beginning all the way through. So anyway, it's a long topic. We need stronger cooperation. We need stronger cooperation with industry as well. One of the. In the earlier days of my career, from about 1980-86, I was involved with the army at that time as first an officer, then a civil servant. And it was during the Cold War, height of the Cold War, and if the Soviets did something that caught us by surprise or if a problem came up that we had to address, we would get a room full of the smartest people we could find. And we didn't care where they came from. They'd be from industry, they'd be from national labs, they'd be from service laboratories, they'd be from operational commands. And you put those people with that mix of expertise in the room, the smartest people you can find, and you try to figure out what you should do and what options you should consider when you'd analyze the ability to have those kinds of communications. That kind of open dialogue has largely been pushed aside by the ethics rules. It's much harder to do that. People are nervous about talking to industry when we should be talking to industry all the time. They're nervous about exposing kind of what they're doing. There are FACA rules in place for advisory groups and so on. And we need to restore some of that level of cooperation, collaboration that we used to have, it really slows us down and it doesn't help us get the good ideas as quickly as we can. And now with all the newer technologies coming in, the automation, particular the various forms of AI, it's particularly important to bring that in because that's changing so dynamically. Even when we were just talking about things like, like the Internet and the virtues of the Internet, what we could do with that. So, anyway, we do need, I think, some fairly significant reforms, but they're not the types of things that people have generally been talking about. Redoing 5002 is not going to solve the problem, but it does.
- [48:50]
Ryan
Sort of the point you're making, though, kind of argues against the traditional model of we need to do some long analytic process to determine what we need in the future, because if the technology is widely available and it's changing very rapidly, trying to do. And I spent my time in the Joint Staff working this process of. Jason, you can't predicting what you need 15 or 20 years in the future doesn't make sense anymore. We really need to be looking much more near term. Even if you're over in darpa, I assume they should be thinking, what's the secret sauce we need to provide? That not necessarily is going to be long term,
- [49:26]
Frank Kendall
you're right. But technology tends to come in waves, right? You get a surge for a while and you'll get a breakthrough technology. The semiconductor, maybe. Large language models might be in that category too. You get a breakthrough technology and then you get a period of adaptation where the people who have very deep understanding of a specific area, PhD level understanding, will come up with some breakthrough new things. And then all the people who may not have that depth, but are creative in other ways and have broad knowledge, start to apply it in very creative ways. And that's what's happening now with LLMs to some degree. So there are waves like that that you have to catch and then you have to figure out how to ride them, so to speak. You need mechanisms that can effectively react to change quickly, but just doing something fast isn't the answer. It's figuring out. So you can have models, you can have simulations, you can have tools available, and you can have teams of people available who do this for a living. One of the major changes I was trying to make in Department of the Air Force was to create those teams. What I found when I arrived was that I had a number of operational problems I wanted to solve. The operational imperatives, I called them, there were seven of them. And I laid those out and I said, okay, I need teams to go address each of these problems. There was no organization in the Department of the Air Force that I could turn to and say, you have to go solve this. That's your mission. I had to create ad hoc teams and I brought together, I brought Tim Grayson in from darpa. I found smart people in uniform, technology people as well as operational people that were relevant to the problem. General officer level one star, two star put them in charge of each of those seven teams as CO leads and they formed groups and off we went. It was very ad hoc and it was not something the establishment, if you will, knew how to do or is prepared to do. I also took the ops analysis shop that had been sitting in the A9 under the Chief of Staff of the Air Force, basically as part of the air staff, elevated up to the secretariat and said, you are now the Department of the Air Force Studies and Analysis Shop. The Air Force used to have one like that at the Secretary Level. And you are going to own all this analysis, but you also own developing capability to do this analysis, creating the models, creating the simulations, bringing up the career field. Right. So expanding the career field so we have more people who know how to do that and putting together all the different pieces. Right. So the first couple of years I was in the job, that's what I did. And I said, okay, we need to institutionalize this. We're in a long term competitive struggle with strategic competition with China. We need to set up the structure of the Air Force so that we can do this all the time. And the major four star commands had responsibility for their operational forces for some degree of training beyond the basic training, the more sophisticated training. And they also had requirements generated. And I said, okay, I want you guys to focus on the readiness of the force that you're responsible for providing to combatant commanders. And I want some other people to be completely dedicated to figuring out what to do next and being basically the centerpiece of the requirements process in the Space Force. I did it a little differently again, because they're so small. I just created a futures organization basically. But what I was trying to create was a structure that would facilitate the type of thing that we're talking about. So you're right, Brian. It has to be agile. It needs to be as cutting edge as it can be. You need people who are steeped in the technology and thinking carefully about its application to operations from both sides of the house. Right. And they can educate each other, they learn from each other and they explore things together. They try things and you get much better solutions out of that. They also need to be open minded. They need to be able to accept that things may change now very fundamentally. Not just incrementally, but very fundamentally. And I don't think we're quite ready for that.
- [53:37]
Ryan
Yeah, yeah.
- [53:38]
Frank Kendall
It's interesting comparison. The Ukrainians have a dashboard, you guys have probably seen where they're UAS brigades and basically they're keeping score of how they're all doing at killing Russians. And they post fairly often, you know how many Russians I killed last week? Right. And they're sort of in competition with each other. It's kind of interesting. But the thing that fascinated me about that wasn't so much that it was what they're talking about. U.S. brigade is the U.S. army talking about a USS brigade. It is not.
- [54:13]
Brian
The army is shutting down its division, cavalry squadrons, like rather than turning them over from attack aviation to uas, they're just unflagging them.
- [54:23]
Frank Kendall
There you go. What I'm seeing all of our services do is figure out how to take the stuff they already have and add unmanned systems to it as an adjunct. And I did that in a way with the ccas and the Air Force too. But I shifted the mass to the CCAs. The concept there is a fighter is going to control several CCAs. Not that I'm going to have a fighter with one CCA that is his buddy and helps him. We're going to have to be, I think again, much more open minded about how significant change these, these new systems are going to enable and eventually require on the battlefield. But we're not there yet. Yeah.
- [55:01]
Eric
I think, Frank, how much of an issue is like both with appropriators, with legislators and within the leadership, the sunk cost fallacy. I've already started down this path. I have to keep going down this path. Yeah.
- [55:17]
Frank Kendall
A lot of the appropriators really hate change. They hate disruption. Right. They like, you know, I'm thinking of some in particular that may not be. I may be generalizing too much here, but they don't. What I think they don't like is they have to go back to the people they work for and say this thing I got you to fund last year isn't going to happen. Now we're doing something else. They really don't like to do that. And I think that because of that they tend to want to force the services to continue doing things they were doing. There's also political support for things. Right. Once a program gets established, established, it's got a constituency even before there's a down select. Right. And I had a conversation with the CEO earlier, about a month ago, I guess about a program that I had tried to cancel and they were able to go around behind me and go to the Hill and keep it funded. Right. It's a political system that's part of the political system, I guess, but it's not very much. It's not what the nation needs. Right. It's diversion of resources and something that shouldn't be as high a priority as some contractor wants it be to me. So there's some of that too. That's real. And I think there's a reluctance to admit you made a mistake. People are generally in the. I've seen people with political leaders come in. They're really happy to kill somebody else's program that somebody else started. They don't want to kill the one they started. Dick Cheney killed the A12. Right. Long time ago. McNamara, Gates, let's see. Did Gates kill A few programs, yes. Gates cut back several programs. You cut back to new bomber, for example, for the Air Force, the intercom cartel, the F22. Cheney killed a few once upon a time when he came in hunting wars,
- [56:57]
Eric
hunting partners and programs.
- [57:00]
Frank Kendall
Yeah, sorry.
- [57:03]
Eric
No, that's what we see is like there's all this talk about hey, we need to more mimic. The department needs to more mimic innovation. On the commercial side, that is also one of the issues too is like their commercial side, because the impetus is fully based on the bottom line and being able to produce something that somebody buys there is a requirement to be able to iterate very, very quickly. That same driver doesn't exist necessarily for the services or for the appropriators. And without that market impetus, there has to be another driver. And I think to Brian's point, like that is okay. You have to be willing to admit failure and set up some type of gauntlet that tests whatever this new thing is short of war, to show that it actually can do the thing that it's supposed to or else we cut the funding for. And I don't know that that exists either because people don't want to run their stuff through that type of a gauntlet.
- [57:57]
Frank Kendall
Well, they're pretty well done away with the OSD reviews and new programs, things we used to do routinely, which I thought benefited. They were bureaucratic too. They could be. I was staff member doing those from the staff view for a while and later on as the primary on the acquisition side. One of the. One of my. You're pointing to why we need good analysis. When I came back, I left in 94, I came back in 2010 and what shocked me, among other things was the amount of the major decisions about new concepts, new designs, new programs we were making by the seat of our pants. A four star would say I want that. And off we go. We spent billions of dollars. I was shocked to see that. I mean, it didn't mean we were going to go in a terrible direction, but we weren't necessarily going in the best direction. And that's one of the reasons I brought the analysis organization back up. I tried to create an organization like that when I was atl and it's interesting because you guys will know these names. After I took over ATL from Ash Carter, I said, okay, I need a studies and analysis organization. I didn't feel that Cape was doing that very well. And I needed to have a much better way to evaluate the cost effectiveness of the things coming through for decisions. And the guy I brought in to do that was a guy named Will Roper, came out of Missile Defense Agency, some of you nodding your head, you know who I'm talking about. Will later was the Air Force Acquisition Executive, but in between, he was head of diu. Ash Carter. I'm sorry, head of SCOE Strategic Capabilities Office. Ash knew him from some briefings he'd been given at some point about mda, where Will was working. And so he grabbed Will from me and I mentioned his name to him, and he sent him off to create the Strategic Capabilities Office. So I lost my head and I got diverted with other things. I think Ash created DIU about the same time, and I ended up supporting diu.
- [59:59]
Brian
Frank, in the remaining moments, and I recognize that we're at an hour and thanks for spending so much time with us today.
- [60:06]
Justin
Now that you are
- [60:08]
Brian
you being out of government but still connected via think tanks and academia and other professional associations, who do you consider credible to monitor technological change and how it affects warfare? To whom do you look to stay relevant? And can you share your insights, or is that a trade secret?
- [60:30]
Frank Kendall
I do go to a variety of sources. I have a few friends that I've been involved in forever and ever to talk to them individually. I mentioned Craig Fields earlier. He's probably the smartest human being I've ever met. He ran DARPA at one time. He ran the semiconductor organization for a while. The head of my science board for the Air Force, the Defense Scientific Advisory Board, the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board Board. Neil Sendal is another person I spend, you know, when I have questions about AI, I usually ask him. And there are a lot of people I know that I talk to Bill a plant, and I stay in contact. Heidi Shu, to some extent. There are a lot of people I read and I've been paying attention to what some of the people in the AI world have been putting out. I thought Dario Amade's paper that he put out recently was. Was quite good. Good. For example, I cited that, I think, in the piece I wrote for the New York Times about the anthropic issues going on right now. There are a variety. I get some magazines that are relevant about technology, and there are a few others. I'm not going to name any of your competitors, but you got a few out there that talk about this stuff a lot.
- [61:44]
Justin
Well, let's do one question on that. I don't know any broader takeaways on the anthropic drama of the past few weeks?
- [61:52]
Frank Kendall
Weeks, no. What I've been trying to tell people, I just did a Podcast on this for a Center for American Progress a couple days ago. There's a tendency to take a look at these things and see them kind of as a morality play. It's not. Anthropic wants to do business with the DOD. It's got a pretty good product. I think. OpenAI wants to do business with DOD. They're both nervous about how the government might use their technology, justifiably so. And frankly, from my point of view, particularly for this administration, so they have concerns. Anthropic was trying to address those concerns through contract language that would have bound the government. The government didn't want to do that. And I'm sympathetic to that point of view. The things they want, the two sticking points, broad area surveillance of Americans and completely autonomous lethality with no human in the Lord not letting you. Those things happen are good things. But there are already laws and policies that prohibit that. And I don't think the way for us as a country to try to address those issues is through contracts with individual firms from the government side of the House. You can't have terms like that in every contract you write. It'd be a nightmare trying to administer it. How do you stay compliant with all that? And the government does try to fulfill, for the most part, its contracts it has. So that's just not the right approach. And if you think your customer is going to use your product in a way which is malicious, you shouldn't sell it to them. You put safety warnings on things all the time. And I think that's closer conceptually to the approach OpenAI is taking. I think they want a list of things that the government's agreeing not to do, but they don't want it as a contractually binding requirement of the contract. And I should be very careful about that because I have not read the language in some of the languages available. I think OpenAI put out some of theirs. But unless you sit down with the actual contract and read it, you don't know what's in it and you don't know exactly what the constraint is. So I reserve judgment on how big a difference really is between the two. There are some things I have heard about personality conflicts essentially, that are a factor here, where people just don't like each other and don't want to do a deal with each other, and that's a factor. I don't know if that's true. Not. But I do think that what we should be doing is figuring out how to regulate AI in a way which is meaningful, but doesn't Slow us down dramatically and create a huge amount of meaningless bureaucracy, which is a tricky thing to do. I think that ball needs to get set in motion by the Congress. The Congress can't do it itself. Kind of the point made earlier that expertise isn't there and it's too complicated. It's where you need some kind of regulatory framework and people who really understand that and hopefully can work cooperatively with industry to do things that we all should want to have happen. Right now the administration is taking a position of no regulation at all and it's attacking states who are trying to do some regulation at the state level. That's not the answer either. So we need something in between. And we may need a new agency that does this dedicated to that kind of expertise. Or we could do it through some of the existing agencies or some combination. But I don't think doing nothing is the right answer. And I don't think that trying to do it through individual contracts is the right answer either. The one point I do want to make there, I should end with this. What the government is doing to Anthropic is outrageous. It is trying to destroy a company because you couldn't get a contract agreement with it. That is not the way the government should operate. It's an abuse of their power. The tool, the supply chain risk designation has nothing to do with what Anthropic is doing. It's just a way to punish them for not agreeing to what the government wants. That's not the way we as Americans should want our government to operate. Unfortunately, it's a feature of this administration that it uses whatever tools in the room, in the toolbox to attack those who disagree with it and disappoint. Government won't do what it wants, whether it's a law firm or a university or a corporation. We shouldn't tolerate that. That's not the way we want our government to work.
- [65:56]
Justin
I think we can perhaps call it there, hopefully the first of many second appearances. Frank Kendall, thank you so much for
- [66:04]
Frank Kendall
your time this morning. Thank you, guys. Good to be with you.
- [66:07]
Eric
Thanks, Frank.
- [66:07]
Ryan
Thank you.
- [66:08]
Brian
Yeah, I think we. When we talk behind our guests back. Sure.
- [66:11]
Frank Kendall
Yes.
- [66:12]
Brian
Is this like what they used to do on. On Walking Dead? Like there would be an episode of the Walking Dead and then people to have a follow up show where they
- [66:19]
Eric
talk about how they as this character. This is how I feel.
- [66:22]
Frank Kendall
I think that. I think that's.
- [66:24]
Eric
Well, they did at the end of
- [66:26]
Justin
the Game of Thrones shows where they're just like the major episode.
- [66:28]
Eric
It totally Takes you, it kind of
- [66:30]
Justin
takes you out of it. It's like, I know I want to
- [66:31]
Ryan
be in this world.
- [66:32]
Justin
I don't care about like you hanging out in Ireland and like, you know, having to stay up at night to shoot a night scene, like, I'm sorry
- [66:39]
Brian
for your loss or whatever. I want to know how Renly Baratheon is going to deploy his infant century.
- [66:46]
Justin
What were your, what were your takeaways?
- [66:49]
Brian
It's good to hear a professional. I'm sorry, Justin. Just a professional who knows the shot saying, hey, there's a lot of big promises and there's a lot of haymakers thrown in this moment in defense innovation or defense tech or whatever you want to call it. But when push comes to shove, the people who are making countries in their military capacity rise and fall are still these traditional big industrial providers. And that doesn't sanctify them. It doesn't make them wholesome or noble or anything like that. It's just like they are the deliverers. And there are a lot of people in dress sneakers and crew neck T shirts and blazers going up on panel discussions, running their mouths about the future of war. And the future of war has been around for like five years. And what's, like, what's the deliverable?
- [67:34]
Eric
Yeah, I mean, like, that's my big takeaway too. Was like, it is, it's always refreshing to see somebody or to talk to somebody who has been in the game for a very long time, who will speak frankly. Not to make the pun that's there, but he served through multiple administrations. He served in various roles across the Pentagon, across the Air Force. And he's able to come in with a lens and talk about, hey, these are the actual changes and restrictions. And, and to his credit, he was able to point out places where this administration has been directionally correct, but then also say like, hey, there's a lot of believing the advertising that's been going on with defense tech with just kind of like Prime's bad, Silicon Valley good. And the truth is much more nuanced. And really where we have core issues are things that the Pentagon itself can't control.
- [68:30]
Frank Kendall
The Pentagon's not going to change the
- [68:32]
Eric
fact that four star generals and four star admirals believe that they are God's gift to the military. That's not going to happen. Like, you've raised them to think that that's how they are. So until you put structures in place that show them like, no, just because you think it should have an extra cup holder doesn't mean that that's a requirement that has to exist. And stripping out that in the name of stripping out bureaucracy, those checks on those people makes the system more fragile and not more robust in a time
- [69:04]
Frank Kendall
when we're going into war.
- [69:05]
Eric
And I think Frank, a lot of what he talked about alluded to the need for that type of bureaucracy and not the type of bureaucracy that just overburdens war fighters.
- [69:21]
Brian
If I had a few more minutes with them, if we had maybe a second episode, he spent a lot of time talking about the very precise organizational decisions that the Pentagon has made or that Congress has made for the Pentagon. And I would want to hear him say, with the benefit of hindsight, you've had 12 years of Diu and I'm really glad you covered this. But what is the mission of DIU as opposed to DARPA, as opposed to any of the other hash works, AFWorks, SpaceWorks, DefenseWorks, Softworks, or the National Labs? And at some point does somebody's heart have to get broken to just say, hey, this is redundant, Shut it down, start over and think through how the Pentagon is going to rapidly assess technological development and get it into the hands of the services. Because right now we just have a series of false pretenders to the throne. Everybody has a billion dollar budget and the ability to claim that they lead technological development for the department. And it is again, not necessarily leading to superior results on the battlefield. Lucas is again a flying Lawnmower from the 1980s. And that's like the revelation of this campaign.
- [70:37]
Eric
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think that's right. And I think that, you know, obviously I'd like to have Frank Hahniget because I think that just one wealth of knowledge, but then also just I think this is one of those discussions that's going to continue to grow because the defense industrial base and the changes in the defense industrial base, especially if now like the administration saying this may go on till September, Iran may go on until September. Like that's some different calculus that's going to have to be going into what our defense industrial base looks like for, you know, pretty midterm.
- [71:12]
Justin
I'm not saying that is just hegseth not wanting is like that's the stupid like timeline Obama era debate and them kind of doing the reverse of that. I would not.
- [71:21]
Frank Kendall
Yep. Yeah.
- [71:22]
Brian
That's why they're also, that's why they're also tap dancing around putting troops on the ground because they, they have learned from immediate from a strategic communications perspective, you do not box yourself in. They remember what happened to Secretary Kerry around the red line moment and how he had to go out in front of the Obama admin and talk about these pin prick airstrikes against the Ba'. Athists. And he looked ridiculous. The country looked foolish, the president looked indecisive. And above all, Pete Hegseth is a TV presenter. That is his job. He is an attempted charity manager, but he's really a TV pundit like right out of V for Vendetta. He knows what the opposition faced because he had helped shape it and he has learned that lesson.
- [72:09]
Justin
All right, let's call it here. I also want to thank Frank for giving us a whole guest list. If you are that person who he shouted out, you're probably second breakfast worthy. Oh, or if you're out there, say hi.
- [72:22]
Brian
Otherwise I'll will Roper send send us a note.
- [72:25]
Frank Kendall
Yes, we will give you Craig Fields
- [72:27]
Eric
near Cind Neil Cindle expect cold emails from York.
- [72:33]
Justin
All right, bye everyone.
- [72:35]
Frank Kendall
Good morning.
- [72:52]
Narrator/Poet
They cracked a shade took the whole thing apart a lawnmower engine with an American heart built it from foam and from plywood and dreams sold it to Putin Ukraine burst at the seams pulled the wreckage from the frozen ground Spectre works said thank you the plan was found Iran handed us his playbook on a plate we copied every bolt got it straight 40 years of your design now we're sending it back down the line Lucas buzzing through the Persian Gulf Night 35 grand of kamikaze m lawnmower engine and the targets in sight low and slow and screaming to the light up big fury task force scorpion strike February morning over tear and light you spent decades chasing this dream now hear that lawnmower scream 2-28-100 planes took flight B2S from Missouri dead from the night but tucked in the first wave something else flew the cheapest killer that terra never knew they hit shah hit for Gary the factory floor where thousands of shah hits rolled out before. Lucas buzzing through the Persian Gulf Night 35 grand of kamikaze mite lawnmower engine in the top gets inside low and slow screaming for the light we took your design painted it red, white and blue 40 years of work we sent it back to you you spent decades building this dream engine Spider delivered free.
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