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Weekend Reads
“We are in an undeclared state of emergency,” warned Palantir’s Shyam Sankar, the newest member of Hudson’s Board of Trustees, during a Hudson event with Distinguished Fellow Mike Gallagher and Senior Fellows Nadia Schadlow and Peter Rough.
Despite wars in Ukraine and Israel and rising tensions around Taiwan, the United States Department of Defense has failed to change the acquisition and force design policies that have hollowed out the US defense industrial base and left America’s military unprepared for war. Read on to learn how Washington can change course.
Key Insights
1. The Department of Defense should learn from China’s success and return to the free-market strategies that built America.
“I think the reformation is about getting back to an American industrial base where the economy is invested, not only in prosperity, but also freedom. We’re able to leverage commercial innovation to enhance our national security, which unfortunately is exactly what the Chinese are doing. Chinese primes only derive 27 percent of their revenue from the [People’s Liberation Army]. The rest is from us patsies buying cheap crap on Amazon, subsidizing lethality against US service members. . . . [But] you either believe in the free market or you don’t, and everyone, including the Chinese and the Russians, has given up on communism—except for, seemingly, Cuba and the DoD. . . . There’s no world in which we’re going to be better commies than the commies. So we should lean into what has actually generated all of this US prosperity.”
2. The next administration needs to take risks and implement bold ideas to achieve real-world results.
“I do think a lot of the officials now being vetted and who will be out there and likely to take places, they’re risk takers. They will take the risks. It’s the job of institutes like Hudson to come up, literally, with the lists of the things that need to be done. . . . Not doing more studies necessarily, but drawing on all of the work we’ve already done. . . . How do you build the hedging force that Bryan Clark and Dan Patt and my colleagues have discussed? . . . How can you use AI more effectively to come up with the chemical compounds that you need for these [new] energetic materials? There’s a lot going on. We have a lot of strengths in the R&D community in this area. It’s really about scaling the innovation and scaling it to actual manufacturing, and we know how to do that.”
3. The US military needs to concentrate its resources against its adversaries’ weaknesses.
“If you’re a Marine, you think of everything in terms of maneuver warfare. . . . You concentrate resources where they matter most, and ideally you apply your strength to your enemy’s weakness. And so we have services that talk a lot about doing that in a warfighting context, but in an acquisition context, do not do that. They spread resources all around in a variety of places that don’t deserve them, and they don’t apply them in the critical areas where it can have an asymmetric interest. And then I think the diplomatic or gray zone version of this would be, we just have to be comfortable constantly counterpunching and deterring China in creative ways. We’re afraid of our own shadow. I’ve thought that every time that a Chinese vessel rams a Filipino vessel, magically, a small team of marines armed with a NMESIS system should appear in the Philippines and we say, listen, this is a rotational deployment. As soon as you guys stop acting stupid, we will get rid of them. But we’re just not good at that.”
Quotes may be edited for clarity and length.
Go Deeper
James Litinsky, founder, chairman, and CEO of America’s only rare earths mining and processing facility, MP Materials, sat down with Mike Gallagher to discuss the importance of the American critical minerals industry for winning the new cold war.
The fact that the US is the world’s leading software creator should headline discussions around rebuilding America’s military dominance, argued Shyam Sankar on Arsenal of Democracy.
Senator Tom Cotton, Shyam Sankar, Palantir Cofounder Joe Lonsdale, and other experts joined Hudson for a two-panel discussion on how the US military should adapt how it budgets, tests, acquires, and deploys new and existing weapon systems.
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