Manifesting the Future of Air & Space Power
September 24, 2025
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This transcript was generated with the assistance of AI. Please report inconsistencies to comms@afa.org.
Lt. Gen. David Deptula, USAF (Ret.):
Ladies and gentlemen, I am absolutely delighted to welcome you to this fireside chat with Chris Brose. Now, you know Chris as the author of “Kill Chain: Defending America in the Era of High Tech Warfare.” It is a spectacular book, and if you haven’t read it, I commend you to do so. Now, Chris served as the staff director of the Senate Armed Services Committee under Chairman John McCain. Prior to that, he was a speech writer for former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. And now he’s President and Chief Strategy Officer of Anduril. So the bottom line is, Chris is a transformative defense figure, and Chris, we’re really pleased that you could join us today.
Chris Brose:
Pleasure’s mine, thanks for having me.
Lt. Gen. David Deptula, USAF (Ret.):
Well, I think we’ll start out with a pretty easy one, and that’s, after all those years and success in government, what led you to change to switch from government to industry?
Chris Brose:
It’s a great question. When Senator McCain passed away, my view was I had had one of the best jobs in government, working for one of the best people at the absolute best time. So I didn’t really feel like there was a lot more that I could do in government that was going to surpass what I had had the opportunity to do for the better part of ten years working for him. In addition to that, the call to get into industry was really powerful for me. The more I worked in government, the more I saw the challenges that we had on the innovation side, on the industrial base side. To me, I felt like that’s where a lot of the energy really needed to come from to solve a lot of the problems that we’re talking about here. So not just joining industry, but joining a different kind of industry to continue to work on defense and national security was what I felt strongly about seven years ago, still feel strongly about today.
Lt. Gen. David Deptula, USAF (Ret.):
It seems like you made a good choice.
Chris Brose:
So far, so good. You never get too ahead of these things. It’s a long road, but so far, so good.
Lt. Gen. David Deptula, USAF (Ret.):
Roger. Now, Anduril’s business model is centered around investing in IRAD to develop products and then selling those products off the shelf to customers. How have you seen buying and acquisition patterns change in response to that model, if at all?
Chris Brose:
Yeah, so I think more broadly, what we’re looking to do is really lean in with investment that we have kind of across all areas. Whether it’s putting a lot of investment toward facilitating and building up factories to be ready to do large scale production, developing capabilities that we think the government or military partner might desire to have, even though they can’t necessarily articulate a requirement for it just yet. Hiring people and building up teams in advance of a contract or something like that. So it really cuts across everything that we’re doing. And it’s really the philosophy that we have to move quickly. We have to move quickly in industry. We wanna understand the problems that the government has, but we also don’t wanna assume that the government always knows all of the answers to the problems that it has. And that’s where I think we need to be a bit more forward leaning, a lot more forward leaning in terms of really bringing technology, people, teams, facilities and other things to bear. To help move as fast as I know all of our partners in government want to be able to move and at times are really struggling to move because of a lot of the bureaucratic and political challenges that you mentioned. I’ve absolutely seen that change. I mean, in the seven years that I’ve been at Anduril and even going back to my time in government a decade ago, we’re having a very different conversation, right? I mean, there’s a whole new sector of defense technology companies that exist now that didn’t exist ten years ago. And that in and of itself, I think, is changing the way the government thinks about capability and works with industry. And that’s a wildly good thing. There’s still a lot of challenges in front of us, to be clear, but I think the conversation we’re having around procurement, budgeting, agility, innovation, large scale production, all of that is very different. It really just comes down to are we actually now going to do the things that so many of us have said for so long that we need to do?
Lt. Gen. David Deptula, USAF (Ret.):
And I think you hit upon a piece that those of you who’ve been around the last two days have seen the Air Force and Space Force leadership hit upon. And that’s being able to do things faster. And so obviously that’s right up along the lines of what you’re trying to do at your company. Let me ask you a little bit broader question. And that’s your take at the macro level on the current defense imperative. Are we at a crucial make or break moment when it comes to national security?
Chris Brose:
I believe we are. I kind of wrote a book about this five years ago, so I appreciate the call out. And that was basically the thesis of the book. So I feel like we’ve been at a make or break moment for a while. And that challenge doesn’t necessarily get better. So what is the problem? What is that imperative like you mentioned? I guess simply put, my view is the whole model in which we think about American military power is being disrupted. And that is something that we need to change in order to get right to deal with the disruptions we’re seeing as being imposed on us by the adversary, by the threat. The disruptions that we’re seeing in technology, commercial technology in particular. And then the disruptions that we’re seeing just in our own industrial base, where for 40 years we’ve have a strategic competitor that’s been hyper industrializing while we in the United States have been de-industrializing. So I think all of that creates a bit of a perfect storm when you think about how we have thought for a generation around military power being something that we assume if we end up in a conflict, that conflict is not gonna last a long time. We are not gonna have to lose a lot of systems and vehicles. We’re not gonna have to shoot a lot of weapons. We’re not gonna have to replace a lot of things. And it’s all gonna be over relatively quickly. And I think that whole model is being completely overturned by all the different factors that we just mentioned. And I think the evidence for that is in front of us in terms of conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine and Novorna Karabakh and pretty much everything else that we’re reading about. The assumptions that we need to make about the future are radically different than the ones that we’ve been building military power for a generation around. And I think that’s something that this conference has been spending a lot of time talking about, the senior leaders you mentioned are talking about. And certainly we at Anduril have been working hard on for the past eight years.
Lt. Gen. David Deptula, USAF (Ret.):
Very good, let’s expand on that a bit and chat a little bit on the idea of scale. For years we’ve seen tech companies and DoD pursue innovation to offset mass. The main example being stealth and precision, enabling a much lesser number of aircraft to achieve the same kind of effects that it took hundreds of bombers to do in World War II. One of Anduril’s main talking points that you just hit upon focuses on the importance of mass, so let me ask you, what caused you and your team to pursue this approach?
Chris Brose:
Yeah, I think that when you look at the challenge that China poses in particular, they have gone to school on us for 25 years. They know how we project power, they know how we think about the sort of underlying foundations of power projection. And they’ve basically systematically modernized and built up a military to take away a lot of those underlying factors that all of us have come to take for granted almost for a very long time. So forward basing, logistics, communications, intelligence, command and control networks, the electromagnetic spectrum, access to all of that space, and that is gonna be a challenge in terms of how we think about power projection and the assumptions that we’ve made for a very long time. That we’ll be able to survive, we’ll be able to penetrate, we’ll be able to persist, strike with precision, not shoot a lot, not replace a lot, and ultimately have everything over in a relatively short period of time. And I just think that the challenge that we’re seeing as posed by the Chinese military just really kind of explodes those assumptions. So if you’re now making a set of assumptions that conflict is going to be protracted, we are going to take a lot of combat losses. We are gonna deplete a lot of our munitions inventories, and we’re gonna have to sustain that over a long period of time and replace and regenerate combat capability. I think that you’re sort of ineluctably led to the conclusion that we have got to get mass back on our side. And historically, that’s not really a sort of challengeable proposition, right? I mean, that’s how we have won wars historically, is we have outproduced, outlasted, and essentially outfought an adversary through the deployment of mass and the persistence of mass over time. And I think that is a unique feature of what this great power rivalry, I think, imposes on us, which is stealth is not dead, precision warfare is not dead. We still need those kinds of exquisite capabilities. We’re still going to find technological advantages there. But that in and of itself is not gonna win for us in the future. I would contend, prepare to be challenged on it. But I think that’s where we have to complement this exquisite, amazing legacy force that we have with a different type of military system, both vehicles, platforms, and weapons that can be mass produced, that can be regenerated quickly when we do lose them. And you can protract and sort of sustain that as a function of time when the war is not over in days and weeks, but is extended for months and years.
Lt. Gen. David Deptula, USAF (Ret.):
No, I think that’s spot on, and all you have to do is look at what’s happened in the Russia-Ukraine conflict. And as you said, or implied, stealth and precision achieving particular effects is not exclusive to having sufficient numbers translating into mass to deal with the reality that the enemy has a vote. And this may not be over rapidly or quickly. And so we need to be prepared for that. So thanks for that. Now, I understand that some folks have questioned your company with respect to you having completed this swing on scale. Have you actually delivered at scale?
Chris Brose:
Yeah, I mean, I think we have delivered at scale on the work that we’ve been doing to date, right? So we fielded several hundred completely autonomous surveillance systems to the Department of Homeland Security, hundreds of counter UAS systems to different military customers, including Special Operations Command, loitering munitions and other kind of classes of capability that way. I enjoy the question because it feels a little bit like kind of criticizing the space program in 1967 for why they hadn’t gotten to the moon yet. And I kind of look back over the past eight years and there’s always these types of questions that have been asked of us. Can you innovate? Do you understand the customer? Do you have anything to offer? Cool, you can do small things, but can you actually develop large things? And along the way, we have seen those hurdles in front of us and we’ve had a plan and we’ve resourced that plan to be able to clear those hurdles. And we fully know that there’s another set of hurdles in front of us. So when we talk about producing and delivering at scale, I think the benchmark we’re applying to that is an order of magnitude larger than how we traditionally talk about it in defense industry. I’m not interested in building a couple or a few hundred things a year, or dozens of airplanes a year. Back to the conversation we were just having, for us to be able to win, we need to be in the business of an order of magnitude increase in terms of platforms, sensors, weapons, and capability of all kinds. So really moving from what passes for large scale production today, but I don’t think anybody in commercial industry, for example, would think that even comes close to the hyper scale production that they are looking at here in terms of commercial automotive as a good example. So for us, that’s the bogey we’re chasing. And we’re making the investments, we’re creating the facilities, we’re building the team to be able to do that. That challenge is in front of us, grade us on whether we achieve that outcome. But as I sit here today, I definitely wouldn’t be betting against us.
Lt. Gen. David Deptula, USAF (Ret.):
Very good, thanks for those insights. Now, Congress and the Department of War, Defense, whatever your preference have said that scaling munitions production is one of their highest priorities. And they both spent decades investing in munitions. How do you view the current munitions landscape today?
Chris Brose:
Yeah, and this is where I’m admittedly guilty of kind of historical involvement. Look, I’m all in favor of spending money on munitions. I’m all in favor of getting weapons inventories up. I’m also reminded of ten years ago when we got into this. And we had a lot of conversations about why we were continually under investing in critical munitions, why we weren’t spending enough, and we started to spend more. And if you actually go back and look at it, from ten years ago to today, the nation has increased spending on weapons in the Department of War threefold. We’ve tripled the amount of spending that we are putting into critical munitions. The challenge is that when you actually look at the increase in production that we’ve gotten out of that, it lags considerably. So you can go by critical munition by critical munition and see 250, 260% increases in funding and about 23, 24, 25% increase in actual rounds delivered. That’s an interesting magic trick, right? So how does that happen? And I again would contend that it’s because these critical munitions that were designed and developed a long time ago were never designed and developed to be mass producible in the first place. And if you kind of look under the hood of those types of programs, they are riddled with individual piece parts, subcomponents, workforce challenges, none of which scale. So we can put tons of money in, we’re gonna get only limited increases in output out. Again, I am all in favor of putting additional resources into those programs because we need more. But in addition to that, we really need to prioritize building out a complimentary set of weapons programs like the Air Force is doing with the ETV FAM program, with other types of low cost mass manufacturable weapons programs that I know are sort of coming out of the Air Force to really think about how do you complement that legacy inventory of exquisite expensive weapons with an alternative inventory of lower cost mass producible weapons that you can think of as a family of systems. So rather than shooting large quantities of existing weapons, you can shoot a limited quantity of existing weapons and a much larger quantity of cheaper weapons. And that blended salvo is one cheaper than the kind of the traditional salvo you otherwise would have shot. You’re gonna be more effective, it’s gonna be more survivable, you’re gonna achieve the outcome more and the limited weapons that you have and will always have will go a lot further. Because again, as we look at the lessons as you mentioned of Ukraine and others, we thought we had a decent weapons inventory until the Ukrainians went through about a decade’s worth of Javelin and Stinger production in the first several months of combat with Russia. And it’s gonna take us years to get replacement systems onto the battlefield. And so, why in the world do we think that when we’re depleted of JASMs and LRASMs and other types of critical munitions in like day eight or nine of the war, that those things are gonna show up quickly? They’re just not, that’s not what they were designed and developed to be. So again, let’s try to solve that problem as best we can, but let’s do it with a degree of realism that we have put a lot of money into this. We have only moved the needle a little bit on production and delivery. And that the real answer is building out complimentary new programs to offer, to augment exquisite expensive weapons with low cost mass producible ones.
Lt. Gen. David Deptula, USAF (Ret.):
Yeah, that’s great set of insights. I’d also add that during peacetime, there’s really no constituency for weapons. And it’s a favorite tactic of programmers to go to the weapons accounts to search for monies to spend on other programs, so that’s another piece of the pie.
Chris Brose:
You’re totally right. I think my question would be whether the money is actually the biggest limiting factor in terms of scaled production. And having been involved in this for a while, I would argue that it’s not necessarily, even though I agree completely with what you’re saying, and we had these exact conversations when I was back in government ten years ago, asking why are you continually raiding critical munitions to fund other things? And the answer that we got back from the Department of then Defense was, well, our belief is that in a fiscally constrained environment, we need to prioritize the platforms. Because if we end up in a conflict, we can spin up the munitions a lot faster. It’s like, well, we’ve run that social science experiment. It sounded like nonsense at the time. Turned out that it was, and here we are.
Lt. Gen. David Deptula, USAF (Ret.):
No, very good. What do you bring into the table that’s different than what we’ve seen in our arsenals for decades? You hit on many of the factors. Is there anything else you want to add to that?
Chris Brose:
Yeah, I think aside from the mass producibility, right? And again, really thinking about how we design systems from the beginning to be mass producible, to be replaceable quickly and cheaply. The other aspect of it is autonomy. Because we can’t build a force that is got 10x the combat capacity of the force today, if the assumption is I have to then also 10x the number of people that I have. And those people are going to be exceptionally well trained and held to high standards, and that doesn’t scale but so much. So I think from day one, the investments that we’ve really made as a company has really been in building out on the software side, the autonomy capabilities to enable robotic systems or uncrewed systems. To maneuver through the environment, to do their missions autonomously, but then more importantly, to be able to collaborate with other uncrewed systems or with crude systems without lots of human beings and lots of different sort of decision and control loops. That’s something we put a lot of points against. And I think that’s how you really kind of invert the sort of human to machine or human to vehicle ratio from what we’ve traditionally had, which is lots of people required to make one military system operationally relevant. To actually now having a single human being, Airman or Guardian overseeing and supervising the operations of a much larger number of robotic systems or intelligent weapons.
Lt. Gen. David Deptula, USAF (Ret.):
Very good, let’s switch gears a little bit and let me ask you, what does effective deterrence look like to you in the modern era? And what role does air and space power play in that?
Chris Brose:
I think a lot of effective deterrence comes back to having an industrial base that can credibly deliver, and credibly deliver as a function of time. And my concern is if the Chinese Communist Party is looking at the United States right now, it doesn’t necessarily believe that we have that advantage. That if we ended up in a protracted conflict, would we be able to generate and regenerate combat capability under a situation of large scale losses, protracted conflict? That is something that is deeply concerning to me. I think that’s something collectively we need to solve. But back to your point about effective deterrence in addition to that, if the pacing threat remains, the Indo-Pacific theater and China in particular. And I recognize that homeland defense is obviously going to be top priority, always is, always has been, always will be. But if we’re thinking about actually being a global power, I would argue that China remains that pacing challenge. That’s a lot of air and space and a lot of water away from the United States. And I don’t think we’re planning on fighting a home game. So power projection of a different kind across those vast distances is going to be absolutely critical. So the air domain, the space domain to me are gonna be two of the premier domains that we’re gonna have to be dominant in in the future. Even more so than some of the others.
Lt. Gen. David Deptula, USAF (Ret.):
Very good, which your remarks remind me of a phrase I like to use with my PACOM commander friends when they talk about the oceans being 70% of the world’s surface and reminding them that air and space covers 100% of the globe.
Chris Brose:
This is true.
Lt. Gen. David Deptula, USAF (Ret.):
You’re approaching air power through a new vector, collaborative combat aircraft. And I would share with you and I think you’re aware that one of the biggest takeaways from several of our Mitchell Institute war games is the real value of CCAs isn’t about being cheap. Instead, it comes down to the unique ways in which operators can employ these aircraft. Mind sharing your thoughts on this topic?
Chris Brose:
Yeah, I think that insight’s right. I’d pause on the cheap part for a second though, because I do think, and I think you’re saying this too, is that the affordability of the system, the replaceability, right, of all the illities that we always care about. Affordability, availability, replaceability are pretty important and it’s been a priority of the program from the beginning. So having that mass on your side, knowing that if you do start attriting these systems, you can regenerate them on a timeline that is relevant. That’s hugely important. However, I agree completely with you, how we are going to employ these systems across different missions and fundamentally how they’re going to collaborate with manned systems and how those human beings are going to remain kind of in command of this larger and larger robotic force is incredibly important. It’s something that again, we’re putting an enormous amount of investment against. This is something where the advancements that we’re seeing in the commercial side from generative AI actually enable an entirely different approach to how humans interact with these systems in much the same way that my high school student interacts with ChatGPT to do his history homework. It opens up all kinds of interesting opportunities in that regard. And I think that’s the other piece that I’d offer, which is on the software side. The ability of these systems to be learning systems, to be intelligent systems, where you know that when you are flying one mission one day, you’re going to be flying effectively a different aircraft the next day. Because it is learned from its environment. It is learned from all of the other systems that have been out there operating both manned and unmanned. And it’s adapted at the level of software to be able to deal with threats, to counter threats, to maneuver differently. And again, I think to us at Anduril, that is the main lesson that we take away from Ukraine, right? It’s not this particular widget or that piece of technology or this commercial advancement. It is that the whole game is in agility and how quickly you can learn the lessons of the battlefield. And then push them back into a development and deployment cycle that outmatches what your adversary is doing. Again, this is a blinding flash of the obvious to everyone here who’s studied history for any period of time. But that is something that I think is gonna be the whole game in the future, which is around agility and adaptation and learning. And I think CCA is a program and is a software defined, AI defined capability. That’s really to me the main advantage that a system like that has to offer.
Lt. Gen. David Deptula, USAF (Ret.):
And you wrote about that in your book. But what you just said is something that I think is extraordinarily insightful. And that is, that particular CCA is not gonna be the same the next day as it was before it learned how it’s modifying or how it’s gonna modify itself to operate the next time around. And I think, Chris, take that down. That’s an important learning point. So to cut to the chase, when are we gonna see a flight testing announcement on YFQ 44A?
Chris Brose:
Yeah, it’s gonna be imminent. Not gonna sit here and put pins in the calendar. But I am entirely confident that this is a matter of weeks away. And I think this is a question that we’re getting asked a lot here this week. And it’s a fun question to get, right? But I think to a certain extent, it’s the wrong question. The way I would ask the question is when we do fly in a matter of weeks, how in the world was that possible? So we got on contract less than a year and a half ago. And we will have gone from signed contract, clean sheet design to first flight of, I mean, you’ve seen the airplane on the floor here. I mean, this isn’t a quadcopter. This is a big airplane, in under a year and a half. We will do that without the benefit of this airplane having kind of any derivative lineage from any previous aircraft program that we had been working on for several years, we haven’t had that. And we will do this starting with the actual hard problem. So we are starting with autonomy as an actual pacing item for first flight. So when we fly, it is not going to be a remotely piloted flight. There’s not gonna be a human being manually flying that airplane. It will be an autonomous flight in the sense that a human operator will push the button, the aircraft will taxi out onto the runway. It’ll go nose down the runway, the human will push the button again. It’ll take off, it’ll fly, it’ll fly the profile that has been programmed into it. And when you want it to return, you’ll push the button a third time, it’ll return to base, it will land, it will taxi back into the shelter. So we are starting with the hard problem because we believe that at the end of the day, CCA is an airplane program, I get it. But CCA is an air power program and an autonomous air power program in particular. So you have to be able to do these things autonomously. And that is a level of investment that we’ve put in to the software side of this program, certainly going back to well before we won the contract and really going back to the beginnings of our company. So we actually feel like we’re in an incredibly good position when we do fly to be moving toward the real objective here, which is an autonomous aircraft that is capable of doing all the kinds of learning and adaptation that we talked about earlier. And then the thing that I would also say is we’re absolutely on the schedule that we laid out, right? I mean, we are on pace to be able to deliver exactly what we committed to the Air Force. And as tempting as it might have been to try to rush so that we could get a really cool headline out of the arrival here at AFA, we’re gonna be far more focused on actually delivering the thing that we said we are going to do, starting with the hard problems of autonomy and getting the aircraft in the air here in a matter of weeks.
Lt. Gen. David Deptula, USAF (Ret.):
Well, that’s great, and we wish you all the best in that regard. And I think that-
Chris Brose:
Turns out flying is hard.
Lt. Gen. David Deptula, USAF (Ret.):
Yeah.
Chris Brose:
But we’re excited.
Lt. Gen. David Deptula, USAF (Ret.):
Well, I think you’re gonna have fun with this next one, and that’s that you see CCA’s incorporation of autonomy and AI as unlocking a similar game changing set of impacts and effects as we saw with the combination of stealth and precision.
Chris Brose:
Yeah, I mean, it’s obviously gonna be different, but I think in the sense of creating a potential offset for the United States in terms of how we think about and design and deploy military power, I absolutely think that is the right model for how we should be thinking and building into the future. And I think that, frankly, for what it’s worth, I think it applies to other services and other domains as well. If we want mass again, if we are assuming that we are going to fight long wars and lose a lot of systems and have to replace a lot of systems, then we’re going to have to get back to a model that enables us to do that, that looks more like what we did during World War II, minus having to put human beings in every one of those airplanes, for example. So I absolutely think that is the way we create an advantage over an adversary that has way more people than we do, an economy that is approaching the size of ours, and frankly, a manufacturing and production and industrial base in many respects that dwarfs what we in the United States have because of a matter of US policy for the past four decades. So we’re going to have to outthink here, and we’re going to have to do things differently, and to me, that is going to be a sort of core tenet of how we need to be thinking about designing power for the future.
Lt. Gen. David Deptula, USAF (Ret.):
Let me ask you a question, follow-up question that many people have thrown out there, some pretty famous and very wealthy in the context of uninhabited aircraft like CCA as well as inhabited aircraft. Do you see a relationship between the two? Is it “and” or is it “or”?
Chris Brose:
I think it is “and.” I hesitate to make predictions about the future, but as far as into the future as I’m capable and willing to make productions, I still see human beings in airplanes, one, because we have a lot of them, and two, because we’re continuing to lead development of remarkable manned aircraft, you know, from B-21 to F-47, those are cutting-edge capabilities. The challenge is we will be limited in the numbers of them that we will have. So augmenting those systems as the Air Force leadership has stressed, as the President has stressed, as part of a family of systems that includes low-cost or lower-cost autonomous systems, that to me is the real solve here. So it is a both/and. You know, we need to be in the capacity multiplication business as a country. And we care about having human beings supervising robotic systems, particularly when those systems are going out on offensive operations, when they are engaged in acts of violence. I think this country, with the democratic values that we have, is going to continue to prioritize having a human being, one, making decisions about what are lawful targets on the battlefield, and two, making decisions about engaging in acts of violence against those targets. Some of those decisions, a lot of those decisions are going to be made in the air domain by human beings and airplanes. A lot of those decisions are going to be made by human beings in other locations. But I think the centrality of manned air power, again, as far into the future as I can see, remains. But that by itself is not going to win us the future or the near future. So I think the priority that the Air Force and the government and the Department of War are putting against accelerating uncrewed systems, autonomous systems like collaborative combat aircraft and complementary low-cost mass-producible weapons programs is absolutely the right answer. But again, this is a both/and, not an either/or.
Lt. Gen. David Deptula, USAF (Ret.):
Very good. Now, part of human-machine teaming often involves connectivity. You wrote the book on this. It’s also something that’s not very sexy, that being assured connectivity. And we know the services are pursuing long-range kill chains and other concepts of operations that demand that assured connectivity. And China knows this, and they’re focused on disrupting those linkages. Comments on where we are on that and what we need to be paying attention to?
Chris Brose:
Yeah, I mean, I’m actually quite bullish on the ability to field a different kind of connectivity to the Joint Force. I mean, I think over the past decade, the focus on all-domain command and control, the focus on integrated battle networks, that has been a driving priority. It’s certainly been a driving priority of the Air Force. And you look at the kinds of innovations that are happening on the commercial side, obviously with space-based communications, but also with proliferated mesh networks. Going back to the idea of getting mass back on our side, we always think of collaborative combat aircraft, for example, as hosting sensors and hosting weapons. It will also be a comms relay node. It will also be able to speak to or communicate with communication satellites in orbit. It’ll be able to move information around the battlefield, route information through it, as will every system, certainly every system that Anduril’s building, and I think increasingly systems that we’re going to need to deploy as a country. And then when you think of on the weapons side, again, need not tell this audience that when you think about what does a long-range kill chain look like with in-flight targeting updates of legacy munitions, I mean, it’s like a space shuttle launch in order to put a lot of these long-range weapons downrange. Again, in a world where you have capabilities coming online like Starshield, you really can think about that if-to problem differently, and it almost starts to become something that gets baked into the capability. And again, that will be contested, but as we’ve seen, that will also be a software fight. And again, having mass in that respect is also going to be to our advantage, and being able to rapidly reconstitute in the event that those types of systems start to get taken away from us is going to be a critical need for the joint force and something that I think as a country we’re well-positioned to deliver on.
Lt. Gen. David Deptula, USAF (Ret.):
Thanks for that. Now, we started this conversation harkening back to World War II and the arsenal of democracy. Your Arsenal One plant has gained a lot of attention recently. Could you talk to us about what its desired outcome is?
Chris Brose:
Yeah. So, Arsenal One is the name of the hyperscale production facility that we are building in Columbus, Ohio. We went through a nationwide search looking for the sort of right location and the right state partner to do that with. And back at the end of last year, it was very clear that Ohio was going to be that partner, and that has been the case. So, we have fallen in on a site that will ultimately be four to five million square feet of production capacity. The first facility is already there. It’s 800,000 square feet. We’ll be building collaborative combat aircraft. We’ll be building weapons in that location, in that building. When we open the doors and start delivering in the first quarter of next year, the first cadre of workforce are already hired and going through training. So, that will be standing up. And then we’ve already broken ground on two additional locations or two additional facilities of that size right on that kind of integrated campus. So, the main thesis for hyperscale is exactly what we were talking about earlier. How do you get to a 10x increase in weapons? How do you produce tens of thousands of vehicles and weapons per year the way that a gigafactory produces four to five thousand Tesla commercial cars every single week? So, again, the production targets that we’re looking at are defined by what passes for large-scale production in commercial industry, not in traditional defense. And our belief was that you had to really consolidate because you got enormous advantages in terms of your ability to really rapidly allocate and reallocate your critical elements, your people, your capital, your machines, your raw materials. So that in the event that the future changes, in the event that you need to surge production of a new type of system or spin up development of a new type of system, you actually have a modular production capacity that allows you to flex very rapidly across different classes of weapons, different classes of aircraft. You know, so whether it’s, you know, CCA Inc. 1 going to CCA Inc. 2, you know, changes to different types of weapons or a whole new system altogether. The belief is that you’ll have in that facility the ability to move very quickly across lots of different types of systems under one roof and really generate the kind of economies of scale. Now, again, if you looked at this through a political lens, the answer would be, no, spread that across the, you know, 50 states and territories. Let everybody get a piece. You know, put every individual program in its own facility. And that would have been the politically easy and advantageous thing to do. But the answer from the standpoint of capability, capacity, scale delivery, we believe is what we’re focused on in terms of putting this under one roof at Arsenal. And, again, we called it Arsenal One out of a belief that there’s going to be an Arsenal 2 and a 3 and a 4. You know, so in terms of replicating this, we feel very confident that the types of facilities we’re building are absolutely replicable and scalable to other locations to include international partners’ locations. And there’s a lot of interest that we’re engaging in right now with foreign allies and partners about what this might look like in their countries as well.
Lt. Gen. David Deptula, USAF (Ret.):
Fascinating. Wish you all the best on that one. As a wrap-up question, if we come back here on stage in 10 years, what are the goals that you want to see realized for Anduril in particular and the U.S. defense establishment writ large?
Chris Brose:
Yeah, again, 10 years is like, you know, more time than Anduril’s been a company. You know, but if I were to look that far into the future, I mean, look, I think the goal for all of us at Anduril from the very beginning, you know, was to build the next great American defense company. And to have the aspirations to be a large company and an integrated company working across the country and internationally, lots of different programs, you know, lots of different customers. I think we’re on that journey. I feel confident in 10 years, you know, we will continue to be on that journey. But I think the broader question is really to the industrial base, right? Like, what does the industrial base look like in 10 years if we’re successful, you know, if a lot of these other newer companies are successful? I don’t think it looks like the way we’ve had it, you know, for the past generation, you know, where really as a function of U.S. government direction, we’ve seen a hyper concentration and consolidation of our defense industrial base that’s incredibly kind of ahistorical, right? It doesn’t track with how we’ve done this traditionally in the United States. So the future to me, future success is not we still have five or six big defense companies, they might just have different names. I actually think it’s more of a back to the future scenario where we have dozens of viable, you know, well-capitalized, successful, scaling defense technology and defense industrial companies working across, you know, weapons and vehicles and mission systems, software and hardware and other things. And they’re capable of being viable systems and companies that are delivering for the government and working internationally. I think that is the kind of, you know, agile and dynamic industrial base we’re going to need for the future. I think that’s how we scale, not just as Anduril, but as the country. And to me, that is success, right? And it’s probably not in my interest to say that, right? And my interest is to say, you know, I want to win and I want to, you know, nobody else to, you know, be there with us. But that’s just not the right answer for the country, right? So we’ve got to get past this kind of weird ahistorical, kind of historically anomalous period that we’ve had since the Last Supper to today and get back to the way that we did it when we were successful, where we had hundreds of companies that were viable and delivering. Some had commercial businesses in addition to defense businesses. But that’s how we scaled production and delivered at scale. And I think we can do that again.
Lt. Gen. David Deptula, USAF (Ret.):
Well, Chris, thanks a million. I’ve learned a lot. I know our audience has learned a lot. And we very much wish you the best in success and appreciate you taking the time to be here today and wish you a great air and space power kind of a day. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in thanking Chris Brose to share his insights with us.
Chris Brose:
Thank you.