Trump Weakness Exposed at Pentagon

I think that the world has entered

the era of precise mass.

And by precise mass, what I mean is the intersection of advances in artificial intelligence and autonomy to help pilot some of these systems, commercial manufacturing and the fact that you can use commercial manufacturing to build lots of these drones.

You don't need like super, super fancy production facilities that only exist in like two parts of a country.

And the fact that precision guidance, which we used to think was a thing that the US military had access to, and maybe like China, Russia, Israel kind of did, but nobody else, that's 50-year-old tech at this point.

And that technology has spread.

So now every military around the world and even militant groups like the Houthis now have access to precision strike, but often they can't afford those $2 million Tomahawk missiles.

And so what are they doing? they're innovating by building these lower cost, cheaper systems that can go anywhere from a couple of kilometers to a couple thousand kilometers in the case of something like Iran's Shaheed 136.

Okay.

No, that makes sense.

And when we think about like, you know, we're reading in the headlines, things like the US missile interceptor missile inventory is being depleted, which creates a risk to the country.

What are your thoughts on that? Is that a true statement? Or are you concerned about those things?

It's so bad.

The U.S., since the end of the Cold War, we beat the Soviet Union.

It's like the Clinton era, the 90s.

Everything's great, I guess.

And the U.S. military starts consolidating into an arsenal of weapons and of platforms.

Think about a platform like an aircraft carrier and a weapon like a missile that are essentially exclusively exquisite, so super fancy, expensive, you know, like speaks for itself, and hard to build.

And that worked in a world where the US was fighting against people that couldn't really fight back or fighting really short conflicts.

The issue is that in the context of the long campaign against the Houthis, that happened early in the Trump administration and then now into what we're like month eight basically of the war or conflict or whatever we're calling it against Iran.

We're just using up huge stockpiles of these weapons and because they're exquisite and expensive and hard to produce, it means they're also really hard to replace.

And it's not just on the offense with these systems, it's also on the defense.

I compared before the $2 million Tomahawk missile and say the $35,000 Iran Shahid 136.

Tomahawk much better, but you can buy a lot of Shahids for $2 million.

Now imagine that Iran fires a Shahid 136 at an American military base in the Middle East and the US shoots it down.