October 4, 2025 • 26 mins
Newt talks with Chris Brose, President and Chief Strategy Officer of Anduril, a U.S. based company revolutionizing military capabilities with advanced technology for the United States and allied forces. Unlike traditional defense contractors, Anduril rapidly develops and deploys cutting-edge technology by privately funding research and selling ready-to-use products, significantly reducing costs and time. Brose discusses the company's approach to scalable production, drawing parallels to commercial manufacturing exemplified by companies like Tesla. A key highlight is the Ghost Shark project with the Royal Australian Navy, an autonomous undersea vehicle developed in collaboration with Australia, showcasing a successful co-investment model and rapid production timeline. Their conversation also covers the implications of autonomous systems in warfare, the potential for scaling production to enhance military capabilities, as well as the importance of evolving defense strategies to meet future challenges.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
In this episode of newt World, Anderill is transforming military
capabilities with advanced technology for the United States military and
allied forces. Unlike traditional defense contractors, Anderill is building cutting
edge technology at speed by identifying problems, privately funding their
research and development, and selling finished products off the shelf.
(00:26):
Ideas are turned into deployed capabilities in months, not years,
saving the government and taxpayer's money along the way. Here
to discuss ANDRO, I'm really pleased to welcome my guest,
Christian Brose, President and Chief strategy Officer of ANDRO. He's
also a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, a member
of the Aspen Strategy Group, and author of the Kill Chain,
(00:48):
Defending America in the Future of High Tech Warfare. Chris, Welcome,
and thank you for joining me on news World.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (01:09):
What else should we know about ANDROL as a company?
Speaker 2 (01:13):
I think you hit a lot of the important points
in terms of the amount of investment we're bringing to
build our own capabilities, the speed with which we're moving.
I also think the main point that I would also
hit is designing for scale and scaled production, and that's
something that as we've become a larger company. We're now
eight years into our journey. This has really been something
that we've been working on for the past several years.
(01:34):
So when I say scale, I mean scale as indexed
against commercial manufacturing, where you look at a company like Tesla,
they're producing four to five thousand cars per week in
one facility. That's the level of scale that I think
we need to get to or get back to. You
could argue in defence production, where today the production of
a few dozen or a few hundred systems is deemed
(01:56):
to be large scale production. And that's just like nothing
that we would recognize from our own historical experience. That's
not how we won World War Two, that's not how
we generated to terns in the Cold War. That's a
level of scale production that we need to get back to.
And I think there's been a commercial or there's an
ongoing commercial manufacturing revolution that America is helping to lead
that can really kind of advantage us to move sort
(02:18):
of back in this direction for defense as well.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
You know, and one of the more interesting examples is
the Ghost Shark story. The things you did with the
Royal Australian Navy that is a very fascinating project. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
So the Ghost Shark is an extra large autonomous undersea vehicle,
and what that means is it's basically a robotic submarine
the size of a school bus, so it can go
thousands of kilometers, it can carry lots of payload. It's
obviously a submarine system, so it is electric propelled, it's underwater.
And we got started on this project about three and
(02:52):
a half years ago with the Australian Navy. And the
reason we started working with the Australian Navy in part
was because they had been working on a similar type
of program since even before Anderill was a company, and
it wasn't going well and we just saw no path
to be able to do something new with the United States.
So we went to the other side of the world
and what we found in the Australian Navy was an
(03:14):
absolutely serious partner, a partner who is willing and able
to move quickly from the first conversation to getting on
contractors about three months. What was different about the program
was that Andreil did fund half of the development cost
of the system. The Australian Navy funded the other hats,
so it was a co investment model. When we started
this project andrel didn't have a company in Australia, part
(03:36):
of the agreement was that we would incorporate Anderil Australia
as an Australian company with Australian leadership and an Australian workforce,
which we've now done. We committed to delivering three operational
prototype systems in three years, and we actually delivered four,
and we did it ahead of schedule by the better
part of a year. That phenomenal work has now transitioned
(03:59):
to a one point seven billion dollar Australian dollar production
contract which we're now moving out on. We have a
team of probably two hundred people in Australia. The program
has a highly Australian supply chain that's leveraging a lot
of American and UK technology as well. We have a
large scale production facility that we've established in Sydney and
(04:20):
we're basically ready to start pushing these systems off the
line by the dozens with the new contract that we have.
So again from first discussion, first idea, to production contract
and production systems rolling off of a hot manufacturing line,
all of this will be accomplished inside of four years,
which I don't know if it's setting any records, but
I would certainly hold it up to the best achievements
(04:41):
of the US acquisition system.
Speaker 1 (04:42):
Just to make clear for our listeners, the ghost Shark
is a school bus size submarine, so it's.
Speaker 2 (04:49):
Not tiny correct fully autonomous.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
When you say it's fully autonomous, does that mean that
it is internally controlled?
Speaker 2 (04:56):
Yes, from a software or from an autonomy standpoint. So
this is almost how it has to be when you're
working underneath the sea, where your communications denied, your GPS denied.
So the ability of the vehicle to submerge, to go
comms dark with o GPS signal and execute a mission autonomously,
to travel out to run a kind of operational mission
(05:17):
and then sort of re emerge, kind of retake signal,
receive additional commands or instructions from a human operator, submerge
and go back and do other things. All of that
has to be autonomous because there's no humans on board.
You don't really have humans inside of the sort of
supervisory loops, so that has to all be done at
the level of software.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
Yes. I mean I remember years ago when it seemed
almost amazing that we first developed vehicles that could loiter
and if I've found a tank which looked like the
right kind of tank, it would kill it automatically without
any kind of human intervention. But now you're talking about
a vehicle that could be a thousand or more miles
away underwater, basically controlled by itself, with humans having designed
(06:01):
the controls. But once you've got it under water, it's
on its own. So how does it know whether or
not to sink a particular vessel.
Speaker 2 (06:11):
It's a great question, and this is where I would
sort of differentiate what the system is capable of doing
and what human beings will allow it to do, and
the ethical considerations and the policy constraints about certainly robotic
systems or autonomous systems engaging in acts of violence is
something that we take incredibly seriously. Obviously, it's something that
our government partners take incredibly seriously. So in terms of
(06:35):
how all of that gets architected from a mission standpoint,
there will be a human being in the loop. There
will be a human being deciding kind of when that
system is authorized to go engage in something that moves
into kind of kinetic action. I think a lot of
times you saw that with rules of engagement, you know
that if you're in a scenario where a certain area
of the ocean is declared kind of a no go zone,
(06:58):
no fly zone, you know, kind of an area of
active hostility, you can kind of relax certain assumptions about
kind of how a system will engage or autonomous system
will engage in that context under the assumption that you're
not going to be seeing commercial traffic because it's been
cleared out of the area. But this is something that
we've taken great care to architect into the system in
terms of long range communications of other types of undersea communications,
(07:21):
so that when a human does need to get in
contact with it, there are procedures and sort of mechanisms
by which that can happen. And it's not just going
to be kind of sent off into the world thousands
of miles downrange to just start killing things willy nilly.
That's not how we operate as a company. That's not
how our partners are ever going to use the system.
And this is more handled at the level of kind
(07:41):
of policy and constraints.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
But I can imagine the most pressing challenge in the
region is the Taiwan Strait. But I could imagine that
something like the ghost Shark, which is relatively inexpensive and
which can be armed with a lot of low cost torpedoes.
None of it's is being used to take care of humans.
(08:04):
You actually, for the size of the vehicle, you can
actually get a lot more in it pricely because you
don't have to have oxygen, you don't have to have
a dining room, you don't have to have a wreck room.
All of that space gets turned into war fighting. That's right.
Speaker 2 (08:18):
The system is very large, but compared to a Virginia
Class submarine, for example, it's small. Your point is right.
All of the square footage of that vehicle is taken
up with pure emission capability. I think the way we
look at it is it's really going to be kind
of a compliment to a lot of those higher end
war fighting systems like a Virginia Class, which is just
a unique piece of capability that's unrivaled on the battlefield.
(08:42):
But your point is right, we can't produce many of them.
They can only carry but so many weapons before they
have to go back to reload. So the focus is
really with a ghost Shark that's weaponized, can I use
that system deployed at scale to go after a lot
of those other targets that otherwise of Virginia class would
have to frankly waste its time going after.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
I think you could design it so that the Virginia
class submarine is coordinating ten or fifteen or twenty of
the ghost sharks.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
In terms of them being a command in control node
for the system that is absolutely doable. My point was
only that in terms of how you're going to use
the exquisite asset or the exquisite capability of a Virginia Class,
you want that going after the hardest of the hard
problems that it and only it is able to do,
and leave a lot of the other kind of lower
level work in terms of what a ghost Shark would
(09:32):
be capable of doing. So it ends up more as
a high low mix of capability. Where again, the Virginia
class could be in command of a lot of those
robotic systems, but it's using them more as adjunct magazines
to go after a lot of the targets that it
itself doesn't want to have to waste torpedoes on.
Speaker 1 (09:47):
But that then gives you the potential per billion dollars
to have a force multiplier of enormous capability.
Speaker 2 (09:54):
Absolutely that's right, and I think that's the whole thesis
here is how do we get to scale? How do
we kind of increase the volume of weapons we have
deployed on the battlefield available to our warfighters.
Speaker 1 (10:21):
As you get into a full production run. Is it
conceivableuld the Australians allow you to then sell it to
third parties?
Speaker 2 (10:29):
Yeah, So this is an active conversation we're having now
where I think in terms of the work that we
would do on that type of system in the US,
I think there's an understanding that that's going to be
a unique relationship that we have with the United States,
and any kind of systems of that class would be
built in the United States. But I think in terms
of collaboration with other allies and partners in the into
(10:50):
Pacific region, that is absolutely something that I think the
Australian government would be in the lead on and I
think that's something that we're very looking forward to in
terms of facilitating that kind of collaboration. To your point,
add and sort of multiply capability that's out there on
behalf of democratic countries and US aligned countries.
Speaker 1 (11:08):
Could you imagine given our own culture and our own bureaucracy,
a willingness to say this thing is actually working, it's
actually being built, we actually understand it, so they just
basically buy the capabilities. You may want to build it
in the US, but you're building something which already exists,
which eliminates all of the developmental time, developmental costs, the
kind of things that drag out forever and make American
(11:32):
weapons vastly too expensive and given the speed of technology,
way too slow to stay inside the technology loop.
Speaker 2 (11:40):
This is exactly the conversation we're having right now, and
the argument is exactly what you're laying out, which is
good news. The Australian Navy and andrel have already paid
the development costs. We've already done all the hard work.
We've gotten the system to the point where it can
now be mass produced just by it. You can missionize
it or weaponize it for your own unique purposes. But
the overarchain system is just ready to go and available
(12:02):
for you to buy.
Speaker 1 (12:03):
You have an end depth understanding of the Congress, to
what extent can your new experiences and your new understanding
of how dramatically capabilities are changing, to what extent can
that be communicated to the Congress.
Speaker 2 (12:17):
It's something that we're actively involved in. And I'll tell
you the thing that really encourages me is when we
go up to the Hill on a bipartisan, on a
bicameral basis, authorizers and appropriators across the board, when we
talk about the work we've done on ghost Shark, for example,
what the capability brings. Everyone's excited about it. There isn't
anyone who thinks this is a bad idea or it's
(12:38):
not necessary. Once you then get into the eaches of
you know, how are you going to budget for it,
over what period of time, etc. You know, we may
see some more specific considerations, but there isn't anyone on
the Hill that I've engaged with who doesn't think that
this is a great model for how to acquire capability. Differently,
that it's something that the US needs to be looking
at and hopefully in the coming years will be something
(12:59):
that the US is actively acquiring.
Speaker 1 (13:01):
I was very struck with a recent report that Ukraine
this year will build four million drones. People tend to
forget that the Ukraine in the Soviet Empire was in
fact a major manufacturing center, has a lot of really
smart engineers and has turned out to be I think,
a much more agile and much more technologically advanced opponent
(13:22):
than the Russians were ready for. I was just reading
a column talking about Israel and the reader which the
Ukrainian experience is in some ways a real threat to
Israel because Ukraine apparently used one hundred and seventeen low
cost attack drones, which apparently they smuggled in in trucks
(13:43):
all the way into the heart of Russia and then
launched them. And it's actually a Masad quality operation, I mean,
not what you don't really think of. We're doing devastating
impact Ukrainian drones that cost I think something like seventy
thousand dollars. We're sinking multimillion dollars Russians and literally drove
them out of the Black Sea. How do you see
(14:05):
this evolution of sort of an agile, information rich capability
that's evolving constantly when confronted with an American system which
is cumbersome, favors very high tech, very expensive and very
slow to produce capabilities.
Speaker 2 (14:23):
I think that we need to learn the lessons of
what's happening in Ukraine. I worry that we're not to
the degree that we should be. And I think there's
a handful to me that jump out and I think
you're hitting them, and I just underscore a few. So
back to the theme of production at scale, the numbers
that you're quoting that the Ukrainians are delivering, it's all
(14:44):
based on an assumption that I think we used to
plan our forces around, but we stopped doing for the
past thirty or forty years, which is, wars are going
to be protracted. We're going to lose a lot of systems.
We're going to lose a lot of vehicles, we're going
to shoot a lot of weapons. We're going to have
to regenerate a lot of loss capability, and then we're
going to have to do that as a function of time.
That's not how we've been building the force, arguably since
(15:06):
the Cold War. We've been assuming that wars will be short,
we'll be able to have a technological advantage through exquisite
systems and stealth and other types of capabilities like that,
and that when we do go to war, it'll be
overrelatively fast. We'll shoot a small number of weapons, we
won't lose a lot of things, we won't have to
regenerate a lot of capability. So I think shifting the
enterprise has a whole different set of planning assumptions is
(15:28):
going to be hard, and I think that it almost
necessitates leaving behind kind of the existing processes by which
we've been building the kind of exquisite traditional military that
we have, and putting in place a parallel process to
define requirements differently, to spend money differently and faster, to
acquire systems that are not meant to last forever but
are something that you can deploy at scale, redesign redeploy
(15:53):
that is, I think, something that we are absolutely capable
of doing. We just need leadership to make it so.
And then I think the kind of a related point
is on adaptability. And that's the other key lesson that
I think we've been learning and others have been learning
on the Ukrainian battlefield is if you have something that
works today, that's great, but it's likely not going to
work next week or next month or next year. So
the real advantage goes to the organizations that can be learning,
(16:16):
organizations that can adapt their technology quickly based on the
lessons of the battlefield, the lessons that their soldiers are
learning and sort of driving back in the technological development cycle.
The US government doesn't work that way. We work on
these long, linear kind of timelines that you just laid out.
It argues for having this kind of alternative pathway for
(16:36):
expendable systems and attrigerable systems, things that are not be
twenty one long range strike bombers and Virginia class submarines
that are just always going to travel a different path.
And we do need those systems. But I think we
have the authorities, we have the resources, we certainly have
the sense of urgency and the desire to do this.
We just need to build an alternative process or an
(16:57):
alternative pathway that allows us to get these kinds of
large scale, lower cost, oftentimes more autonomous systems developed quickly,
produced at scale, produced by a different type of defense industry,
and really bring them into the fold. All of this
is there. I think we have all of the basis
to be able to do this and really change our
defense industrial base, change the composition of our force. It's
(17:20):
just a function of leadership and imagination.
Speaker 1 (17:37):
I'm actually sort of encouraged by what I see beginning
to happen. I've been talking for a number of years
about the difficulty of very large, successful systems to culturally change.
In the last two or three years, I've begun to
sense the ice breaking and the American system being to
look around and go, you know, we are really going
to have to change in profound ways.
Speaker 2 (17:58):
Yes, I think that's absolutely true. I mean, when I
think back to the time that you and I were
sitting in John McCain's Senate office ten years ago talking
about this, I mean, you couldn't mention China in great
power competition in the same sentence without somebody kind of
wagging their finger at you.
Speaker 1 (18:13):
We didn't even.
Speaker 2 (18:14):
Accept that we had a problem. So this tanker has
begun to turn considerably. I think that we're still not
there in the sense of really needing to see the
kind of demand signal at scale. I think that we're
starting to see that spinning up in the first several
months of the Trump administration. I think under the leadership
of the Secretary of War and the Service secretaries, the
(18:34):
Deputy Secretary Feinberg, I think we're really starting to see
a demand signal to industry that is actually related to
the kind of scale of problem that we're facing that
is going to unlock the American system in a way
that we have not really seen happen in the defense world,
probably going back into pretty deep into the last decade,
certainly pre last Supper and industrial consolidation. And I think
(18:57):
that's the level of demand that we need. And to me,
where I'm very optimistic is if the government can sort
itself out at the level of kind of requirements and
funding and demand signal. I think we have all the
raw material in this country to meet that demand on
a timeline that's relevant. We have the talented people, we
have world class technology. We actually do know a lot
(19:18):
about modern manufacturing, we're doing it in a lot of instances.
The ability to kind of generate and regenerate a lot
of that capacity in this country quickly, all of this
is achievable. So to me, it's really just a function
of if the government can think about procuring capability less
in this sort of five year proto communist way that
we've been going about for the very long time, and
(19:41):
actually start to get American capitalism back into defense the
way that it once was. You know, again, I'm not
saying we're going to solve every problem that we're facing immediately,
but I think that we begin to unlock you know,
a different set of behaviors, a different set of incentives.
We have endless kind of access to capital in this country. Again,
all the wrong materials are there. We just need to
(20:01):
sort of write signal coming from the government, and I
believe we're starting to see that.
Speaker 1 (20:05):
In an article you wrote, I think for National Review,
you cited something which I've been told over and over,
which is, every time we do a war game about Taiwan,
we run out of munitions about the end of the
first week. While we build these huge, complex systems that
are very expensive and very capable, in one way, they
(20:25):
deprive us of the redundancy and the inexpensive capacity to
kill that may be at the heart of how you
survive in a conflict like Chinese attempting to cross the
straits of Taiwan. From your perspective, are you beginning to
see us move towards a greater realization that we have
to have a massively larger and more capable of munitions.
(20:47):
Do you have a sense that we're beginning to shift
in our understanding that if we don't solve the industrial
base problem and get to less expensive, dramatically more reproducible capabilities,
that we just will be out of the game.
Speaker 2 (21:01):
Yes, But the yes is I think that there is
an absolute realization that where we are on munitions as
a country is woefully inadequate. And the evidence is exactly
what you just said. And for those who doubt kind
of the outcomes of the war games, you just need
to look at Ukraine, where in the first several months
of combat with Russia, the Ukrainians burned through about a
decade's worth of anti tank and anti air US weapon production.
(21:25):
So those are relatively simple tactical systems, right, So if
we're shooting all of our patriot interceptors, all of our
long range anti shit missiles and other kinds of exquisite weapons,
they're going to take even longer to regenerate. So I
think the desire to have more weapons is real. Historically,
weapons have been a bill pay and I saw this
in my experience in the Congress, where critical munitions lines
(21:48):
were short changed in order to buy more platforms. But
we started to change that, and this is I think
the important point that many folks who haven't been paying
as close attention don't realize. Over the past ten years,
we have tripled spending in this country on critical munitions,
But when you look at the amount of production that
we've gotten as a result of it, it's only twenty
three to twenty four to twenty five percent increases. So
(22:10):
to me, it goes back to the point that, yes,
we do need to spend more money on weapons, but
we need to spend that money differently because a lot
of the critical weapons that everyone is focused on, and
there's about a dozen, we're never designed to be mass
produced in the first place. They were designed to be exquisite,
to be able to go after the hardest of the
hard requirements that you're going to put on those weapons,
(22:30):
and as a result, for any number of countless reasons,
the ability to produce them at scale at an affordable price,
to be able to regenerate them quickly when you lose
them is next to zero. So I think the argument
that we've been trying to make is absolutely, let's spend
more money on the weapons we have, but in addition
to that, we need to spend a lot more money
on low cost complementary weapons. So at andro we're building
(22:54):
a low cost cruise missile for the Air Force and
working with some of the other services on it. It's
going to be as exquisite and capable as a JAZM
or an ELRASM kind of maritime or air launched cruise
missiles or a Tomahawk cruise missile, but it's going to
cost a tenth the price. So if I can create
kind of a blended salvo where I can shoot a
whole bunch of our low cost cruise missiles and one
(23:17):
of those more exquisite weapons, I'm actually shooting a salvo
that costs less than if I just shot all exquisite weapons.
I'm actually burning down the defenses of the system that
I'm shooting at, and that one exquisite weapon is going
to go a lot farther and do a lot more
as a function of being paired with a lot of
low cost complimentary weapons. So it's a matter of needing
to spend money differently on new types of programs to
(23:39):
complement the ones that we have.
Speaker 1 (23:41):
As you watch artificial intelligence and it's very spin offs,
isn't it likely that these low cost systems, in fact,
within a very short time are going to be as
sophisticated and as capable as today's very high cost systems.
Speaker 2 (23:56):
Yeah, So this is a good point in terms of
what we mean by exquisite. From US software standpoint, I
would say the capabilities that AROL is bringing to bear,
whether it's on the go Shark UV or on all
the different weapons that we're building, that software is exquisite.
I mean, it's absolutely world class. It's like nothing else
in the industrial base, and it's changing constantly, so I
(24:17):
can make that weapon effectively a new weapon each time
I recode it or add new algorithms or add new
software digital capability. When we often talk hardware, that's where
I think when we say exquisite, we're getting into different
kinds of seekers and countermeasures and other kinds of survivability
mechanisms that drive up price, that drive up complexity, that
(24:37):
reduce producibility, that sort of drive out lead times. That's
the kind of stuff that really limits our ability to
produce its scale. In addition to a whole host of
other things get into you know, assembly and manufacturing and
critical materials and things of that sort. But you know,
from the standpoint of what's inside of the systems that
we're building, I mean that software is absolutely exquisite. The
(24:58):
good news is that it changes daily weekly. You can
adapt it to the threats that you're facing, and you're
making that weapon incredibly more intelligent than kind of its
traditional alternative.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
Chris, I want to thank you for joining me and
our listeners can find out more about the incredible work
you're doing by visiting your website at Anderil dot com.
Thank you to my guest, Christian Brose. You can get
a link to Anderill on our show page at newsworld
dot com. News World is produceabley gingishree sixty and iHeartMedia.
(25:30):
Our executive producers guards each loan. Our researcher is Rachel Peterson.
The artwork for the show was created by Steve Fenley.
Special thanks to the team at Ginglish three sixty. If
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Right now, listeners of Newsworld can start up for my
(25:52):
three free weekly columns at Ginglish three sixty dot com
slash newsletter. I'm new Ginglish. This is Newsworld.
In this episode of newt World, Anderill is transforming military
capabilities with advanced technology for the United States military and
allied forces. Unlike traditional defense contractors, Anderill is building cutting
edge technology at speed by identifying problems, privately funding their
research and development, and selling finished products off the shelf.
(00:26):
Ideas are turned into deployed capabilities in months, not years,
saving the government and taxpayer's money along the way. Here
to discuss ANDRO, I'm really pleased to welcome my guest,
Christian Brose, President and Chief strategy Officer of ANDRO. He's
also a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, a member
of the Aspen Strategy Group, and author of the Kill Chain,
(00:48):
Defending America in the Future of High Tech Warfare. Chris, Welcome,
and thank you for joining me on news World.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (01:09):
What else should we know about ANDROL as a company?
Speaker 2 (01:13):
I think you hit a lot of the important points
in terms of the amount of investment we're bringing to
build our own capabilities, the speed with which we're moving.
I also think the main point that I would also
hit is designing for scale and scaled production, and that's
something that as we've become a larger company. We're now
eight years into our journey. This has really been something
that we've been working on for the past several years.
(01:34):
So when I say scale, I mean scale as indexed
against commercial manufacturing, where you look at a company like Tesla,
they're producing four to five thousand cars per week in
one facility. That's the level of scale that I think
we need to get to or get back to. You
could argue in defence production, where today the production of
a few dozen or a few hundred systems is deemed
(01:56):
to be large scale production. And that's just like nothing
that we would recognize from our own historical experience. That's
not how we won World War Two, that's not how
we generated to terns in the Cold War. That's a
level of scale production that we need to get back to.
And I think there's been a commercial or there's an
ongoing commercial manufacturing revolution that America is helping to lead
that can really kind of advantage us to move sort
(02:18):
of back in this direction for defense as well.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
You know, and one of the more interesting examples is
the Ghost Shark story. The things you did with the
Royal Australian Navy that is a very fascinating project. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
So the Ghost Shark is an extra large autonomous undersea vehicle,
and what that means is it's basically a robotic submarine
the size of a school bus, so it can go
thousands of kilometers, it can carry lots of payload. It's
obviously a submarine system, so it is electric propelled, it's underwater.
And we got started on this project about three and
(02:52):
a half years ago with the Australian Navy. And the
reason we started working with the Australian Navy in part
was because they had been working on a similar type
of program since even before Anderill was a company, and
it wasn't going well and we just saw no path
to be able to do something new with the United States.
So we went to the other side of the world
and what we found in the Australian Navy was an
(03:14):
absolutely serious partner, a partner who is willing and able
to move quickly from the first conversation to getting on
contractors about three months. What was different about the program
was that Andreil did fund half of the development cost
of the system. The Australian Navy funded the other hats,
so it was a co investment model. When we started
this project andrel didn't have a company in Australia, part
(03:36):
of the agreement was that we would incorporate Anderil Australia
as an Australian company with Australian leadership and an Australian workforce,
which we've now done. We committed to delivering three operational
prototype systems in three years, and we actually delivered four,
and we did it ahead of schedule by the better
part of a year. That phenomenal work has now transitioned
(03:59):
to a one point seven billion dollar Australian dollar production
contract which we're now moving out on. We have a
team of probably two hundred people in Australia. The program
has a highly Australian supply chain that's leveraging a lot
of American and UK technology as well. We have a
large scale production facility that we've established in Sydney and
(04:20):
we're basically ready to start pushing these systems off the
line by the dozens with the new contract that we have.
So again from first discussion, first idea, to production contract
and production systems rolling off of a hot manufacturing line,
all of this will be accomplished inside of four years,
which I don't know if it's setting any records, but
I would certainly hold it up to the best achievements
(04:41):
of the US acquisition system.
Speaker 1 (04:42):
Just to make clear for our listeners, the ghost Shark
is a school bus size submarine, so it's.
Speaker 2 (04:49):
Not tiny correct fully autonomous.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
When you say it's fully autonomous, does that mean that
it is internally controlled?
Speaker 2 (04:56):
Yes, from a software or from an autonomy standpoint. So
this is almost how it has to be when you're
working underneath the sea, where your communications denied, your GPS denied.
So the ability of the vehicle to submerge, to go
comms dark with o GPS signal and execute a mission autonomously,
to travel out to run a kind of operational mission
(05:17):
and then sort of re emerge, kind of retake signal,
receive additional commands or instructions from a human operator, submerge
and go back and do other things. All of that
has to be autonomous because there's no humans on board.
You don't really have humans inside of the sort of
supervisory loops, so that has to all be done at
the level of software.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
Yes. I mean I remember years ago when it seemed
almost amazing that we first developed vehicles that could loiter
and if I've found a tank which looked like the
right kind of tank, it would kill it automatically without
any kind of human intervention. But now you're talking about
a vehicle that could be a thousand or more miles
away underwater, basically controlled by itself, with humans having designed
(06:01):
the controls. But once you've got it under water, it's
on its own. So how does it know whether or
not to sink a particular vessel.
Speaker 2 (06:11):
It's a great question, and this is where I would
sort of differentiate what the system is capable of doing
and what human beings will allow it to do, and
the ethical considerations and the policy constraints about certainly robotic
systems or autonomous systems engaging in acts of violence is
something that we take incredibly seriously. Obviously, it's something that
our government partners take incredibly seriously. So in terms of
(06:35):
how all of that gets architected from a mission standpoint,
there will be a human being in the loop. There
will be a human being deciding kind of when that
system is authorized to go engage in something that moves
into kind of kinetic action. I think a lot of
times you saw that with rules of engagement, you know
that if you're in a scenario where a certain area
of the ocean is declared kind of a no go zone,
(06:58):
no fly zone, you know, kind of an area of
active hostility, you can kind of relax certain assumptions about
kind of how a system will engage or autonomous system
will engage in that context under the assumption that you're
not going to be seeing commercial traffic because it's been
cleared out of the area. But this is something that
we've taken great care to architect into the system in
terms of long range communications of other types of undersea communications,
(07:21):
so that when a human does need to get in
contact with it, there are procedures and sort of mechanisms
by which that can happen. And it's not just going
to be kind of sent off into the world thousands
of miles downrange to just start killing things willy nilly.
That's not how we operate as a company. That's not
how our partners are ever going to use the system.
And this is more handled at the level of kind
(07:41):
of policy and constraints.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
But I can imagine the most pressing challenge in the
region is the Taiwan Strait. But I could imagine that
something like the ghost Shark, which is relatively inexpensive and
which can be armed with a lot of low cost torpedoes.
None of it's is being used to take care of humans.
(08:04):
You actually, for the size of the vehicle, you can
actually get a lot more in it pricely because you
don't have to have oxygen, you don't have to have
a dining room, you don't have to have a wreck room.
All of that space gets turned into war fighting. That's right.
Speaker 2 (08:18):
The system is very large, but compared to a Virginia
Class submarine, for example, it's small. Your point is right.
All of the square footage of that vehicle is taken
up with pure emission capability. I think the way we
look at it is it's really going to be kind
of a compliment to a lot of those higher end
war fighting systems like a Virginia Class, which is just
a unique piece of capability that's unrivaled on the battlefield.
(08:42):
But your point is right, we can't produce many of them.
They can only carry but so many weapons before they
have to go back to reload. So the focus is
really with a ghost Shark that's weaponized, can I use
that system deployed at scale to go after a lot
of those other targets that otherwise of Virginia class would
have to frankly waste its time going after.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
I think you could design it so that the Virginia
class submarine is coordinating ten or fifteen or twenty of
the ghost sharks.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
In terms of them being a command in control node
for the system that is absolutely doable. My point was
only that in terms of how you're going to use
the exquisite asset or the exquisite capability of a Virginia Class,
you want that going after the hardest of the hard
problems that it and only it is able to do,
and leave a lot of the other kind of lower
level work in terms of what a ghost Shark would
(09:32):
be capable of doing. So it ends up more as
a high low mix of capability. Where again, the Virginia
class could be in command of a lot of those
robotic systems, but it's using them more as adjunct magazines
to go after a lot of the targets that it
itself doesn't want to have to waste torpedoes on.
Speaker 1 (09:47):
But that then gives you the potential per billion dollars
to have a force multiplier of enormous capability.
Speaker 2 (09:54):
Absolutely that's right, and I think that's the whole thesis
here is how do we get to scale? How do
we kind of increase the volume of weapons we have
deployed on the battlefield available to our warfighters.
Speaker 1 (10:21):
As you get into a full production run. Is it
conceivableuld the Australians allow you to then sell it to
third parties?
Speaker 2 (10:29):
Yeah, So this is an active conversation we're having now
where I think in terms of the work that we
would do on that type of system in the US,
I think there's an understanding that that's going to be
a unique relationship that we have with the United States,
and any kind of systems of that class would be
built in the United States. But I think in terms
of collaboration with other allies and partners in the into
(10:50):
Pacific region, that is absolutely something that I think the
Australian government would be in the lead on and I
think that's something that we're very looking forward to in
terms of facilitating that kind of collaboration. To your point,
add and sort of multiply capability that's out there on
behalf of democratic countries and US aligned countries.
Speaker 1 (11:08):
Could you imagine given our own culture and our own bureaucracy,
a willingness to say this thing is actually working, it's
actually being built, we actually understand it, so they just
basically buy the capabilities. You may want to build it
in the US, but you're building something which already exists,
which eliminates all of the developmental time, developmental costs, the
kind of things that drag out forever and make American
(11:32):
weapons vastly too expensive and given the speed of technology,
way too slow to stay inside the technology loop.
Speaker 2 (11:40):
This is exactly the conversation we're having right now, and
the argument is exactly what you're laying out, which is
good news. The Australian Navy and andrel have already paid
the development costs. We've already done all the hard work.
We've gotten the system to the point where it can
now be mass produced just by it. You can missionize
it or weaponize it for your own unique purposes. But
the overarchain system is just ready to go and available
(12:02):
for you to buy.
Speaker 1 (12:03):
You have an end depth understanding of the Congress, to
what extent can your new experiences and your new understanding
of how dramatically capabilities are changing, to what extent can
that be communicated to the Congress.
Speaker 2 (12:17):
It's something that we're actively involved in. And I'll tell
you the thing that really encourages me is when we
go up to the Hill on a bipartisan, on a
bicameral basis, authorizers and appropriators across the board, when we
talk about the work we've done on ghost Shark, for example,
what the capability brings. Everyone's excited about it. There isn't
anyone who thinks this is a bad idea or it's
(12:38):
not necessary. Once you then get into the eaches of
you know, how are you going to budget for it,
over what period of time, etc. You know, we may
see some more specific considerations, but there isn't anyone on
the Hill that I've engaged with who doesn't think that
this is a great model for how to acquire capability. Differently,
that it's something that the US needs to be looking
at and hopefully in the coming years will be something
(12:59):
that the US is actively acquiring.
Speaker 1 (13:01):
I was very struck with a recent report that Ukraine
this year will build four million drones. People tend to
forget that the Ukraine in the Soviet Empire was in
fact a major manufacturing center, has a lot of really
smart engineers and has turned out to be I think,
a much more agile and much more technologically advanced opponent
(13:22):
than the Russians were ready for. I was just reading
a column talking about Israel and the reader which the
Ukrainian experience is in some ways a real threat to
Israel because Ukraine apparently used one hundred and seventeen low
cost attack drones, which apparently they smuggled in in trucks
(13:43):
all the way into the heart of Russia and then
launched them. And it's actually a Masad quality operation, I mean,
not what you don't really think of. We're doing devastating
impact Ukrainian drones that cost I think something like seventy
thousand dollars. We're sinking multimillion dollars Russians and literally drove
them out of the Black Sea. How do you see
(14:05):
this evolution of sort of an agile, information rich capability
that's evolving constantly when confronted with an American system which
is cumbersome, favors very high tech, very expensive and very
slow to produce capabilities.
Speaker 2 (14:23):
I think that we need to learn the lessons of
what's happening in Ukraine. I worry that we're not to
the degree that we should be. And I think there's
a handful to me that jump out and I think
you're hitting them, and I just underscore a few. So
back to the theme of production at scale, the numbers
that you're quoting that the Ukrainians are delivering, it's all
(14:44):
based on an assumption that I think we used to
plan our forces around, but we stopped doing for the
past thirty or forty years, which is, wars are going
to be protracted. We're going to lose a lot of systems.
We're going to lose a lot of vehicles, we're going
to shoot a lot of weapons. We're going to have
to regenerate a lot of loss capability, and then we're
going to have to do that as a function of time.
That's not how we've been building the force, arguably since
(15:06):
the Cold War. We've been assuming that wars will be short,
we'll be able to have a technological advantage through exquisite
systems and stealth and other types of capabilities like that,
and that when we do go to war, it'll be
overrelatively fast. We'll shoot a small number of weapons, we
won't lose a lot of things, we won't have to
regenerate a lot of capability. So I think shifting the
enterprise has a whole different set of planning assumptions is
(15:28):
going to be hard, and I think that it almost
necessitates leaving behind kind of the existing processes by which
we've been building the kind of exquisite traditional military that
we have, and putting in place a parallel process to
define requirements differently, to spend money differently and faster, to
acquire systems that are not meant to last forever but
are something that you can deploy at scale, redesign redeploy
(15:53):
that is, I think, something that we are absolutely capable
of doing. We just need leadership to make it so.
And then I think the kind of a related point
is on adaptability. And that's the other key lesson that
I think we've been learning and others have been learning
on the Ukrainian battlefield is if you have something that
works today, that's great, but it's likely not going to
work next week or next month or next year. So
the real advantage goes to the organizations that can be learning,
(16:16):
organizations that can adapt their technology quickly based on the
lessons of the battlefield, the lessons that their soldiers are
learning and sort of driving back in the technological development cycle.
The US government doesn't work that way. We work on
these long, linear kind of timelines that you just laid out.
It argues for having this kind of alternative pathway for
(16:36):
expendable systems and attrigerable systems, things that are not be
twenty one long range strike bombers and Virginia class submarines
that are just always going to travel a different path.
And we do need those systems. But I think we
have the authorities, we have the resources, we certainly have
the sense of urgency and the desire to do this.
We just need to build an alternative process or an
(16:57):
alternative pathway that allows us to get these kinds of
large scale, lower cost, oftentimes more autonomous systems developed quickly,
produced at scale, produced by a different type of defense industry,
and really bring them into the fold. All of this
is there. I think we have all of the basis
to be able to do this and really change our
defense industrial base, change the composition of our force. It's
(17:20):
just a function of leadership and imagination.
Speaker 1 (17:37):
I'm actually sort of encouraged by what I see beginning
to happen. I've been talking for a number of years
about the difficulty of very large, successful systems to culturally change.
In the last two or three years, I've begun to
sense the ice breaking and the American system being to
look around and go, you know, we are really going
to have to change in profound ways.
Speaker 2 (17:58):
Yes, I think that's absolutely true. I mean, when I
think back to the time that you and I were
sitting in John McCain's Senate office ten years ago talking
about this, I mean, you couldn't mention China in great
power competition in the same sentence without somebody kind of
wagging their finger at you.
Speaker 1 (18:13):
We didn't even.
Speaker 2 (18:14):
Accept that we had a problem. So this tanker has
begun to turn considerably. I think that we're still not
there in the sense of really needing to see the
kind of demand signal at scale. I think that we're
starting to see that spinning up in the first several
months of the Trump administration. I think under the leadership
of the Secretary of War and the Service secretaries, the
(18:34):
Deputy Secretary Feinberg, I think we're really starting to see
a demand signal to industry that is actually related to
the kind of scale of problem that we're facing that
is going to unlock the American system in a way
that we have not really seen happen in the defense world,
probably going back into pretty deep into the last decade,
certainly pre last Supper and industrial consolidation. And I think
(18:57):
that's the level of demand that we need. And to me,
where I'm very optimistic is if the government can sort
itself out at the level of kind of requirements and
funding and demand signal. I think we have all the
raw material in this country to meet that demand on
a timeline that's relevant. We have the talented people, we
have world class technology. We actually do know a lot
(19:18):
about modern manufacturing, we're doing it in a lot of instances.
The ability to kind of generate and regenerate a lot
of that capacity in this country quickly, all of this
is achievable. So to me, it's really just a function
of if the government can think about procuring capability less
in this sort of five year proto communist way that
we've been going about for the very long time, and
(19:41):
actually start to get American capitalism back into defense the
way that it once was. You know, again, I'm not
saying we're going to solve every problem that we're facing immediately,
but I think that we begin to unlock you know,
a different set of behaviors, a different set of incentives.
We have endless kind of access to capital in this country. Again,
all the wrong materials are there. We just need to
(20:01):
sort of write signal coming from the government, and I
believe we're starting to see that.
Speaker 1 (20:05):
In an article you wrote, I think for National Review,
you cited something which I've been told over and over,
which is, every time we do a war game about Taiwan,
we run out of munitions about the end of the
first week. While we build these huge, complex systems that
are very expensive and very capable, in one way, they
(20:25):
deprive us of the redundancy and the inexpensive capacity to
kill that may be at the heart of how you
survive in a conflict like Chinese attempting to cross the
straits of Taiwan. From your perspective, are you beginning to
see us move towards a greater realization that we have
to have a massively larger and more capable of munitions.
(20:47):
Do you have a sense that we're beginning to shift
in our understanding that if we don't solve the industrial
base problem and get to less expensive, dramatically more reproducible capabilities,
that we just will be out of the game.
Speaker 2 (21:01):
Yes, But the yes is I think that there is
an absolute realization that where we are on munitions as
a country is woefully inadequate. And the evidence is exactly
what you just said. And for those who doubt kind
of the outcomes of the war games, you just need
to look at Ukraine, where in the first several months
of combat with Russia, the Ukrainians burned through about a
decade's worth of anti tank and anti air US weapon production.
(21:25):
So those are relatively simple tactical systems, right, So if
we're shooting all of our patriot interceptors, all of our
long range anti shit missiles and other kinds of exquisite weapons,
they're going to take even longer to regenerate. So I
think the desire to have more weapons is real. Historically,
weapons have been a bill pay and I saw this
in my experience in the Congress, where critical munitions lines
(21:48):
were short changed in order to buy more platforms. But
we started to change that, and this is I think
the important point that many folks who haven't been paying
as close attention don't realize. Over the past ten years,
we have tripled spending in this country on critical munitions,
But when you look at the amount of production that
we've gotten as a result of it, it's only twenty
three to twenty four to twenty five percent increases. So
(22:10):
to me, it goes back to the point that, yes,
we do need to spend more money on weapons, but
we need to spend that money differently because a lot
of the critical weapons that everyone is focused on, and
there's about a dozen, we're never designed to be mass
produced in the first place. They were designed to be exquisite,
to be able to go after the hardest of the
hard requirements that you're going to put on those weapons,
(22:30):
and as a result, for any number of countless reasons,
the ability to produce them at scale at an affordable price,
to be able to regenerate them quickly when you lose
them is next to zero. So I think the argument
that we've been trying to make is absolutely, let's spend
more money on the weapons we have, but in addition
to that, we need to spend a lot more money
on low cost complementary weapons. So at andro we're building
(22:54):
a low cost cruise missile for the Air Force and
working with some of the other services on it. It's
going to be as exquisite and capable as a JAZM
or an ELRASM kind of maritime or air launched cruise
missiles or a Tomahawk cruise missile, but it's going to
cost a tenth the price. So if I can create
kind of a blended salvo where I can shoot a
whole bunch of our low cost cruise missiles and one
(23:17):
of those more exquisite weapons, I'm actually shooting a salvo
that costs less than if I just shot all exquisite weapons.
I'm actually burning down the defenses of the system that
I'm shooting at, and that one exquisite weapon is going
to go a lot farther and do a lot more
as a function of being paired with a lot of
low cost complimentary weapons. So it's a matter of needing
to spend money differently on new types of programs to
(23:39):
complement the ones that we have.
Speaker 1 (23:41):
As you watch artificial intelligence and it's very spin offs,
isn't it likely that these low cost systems, in fact,
within a very short time are going to be as
sophisticated and as capable as today's very high cost systems.
Speaker 2 (23:56):
Yeah, So this is a good point in terms of
what we mean by exquisite. From US software standpoint, I
would say the capabilities that AROL is bringing to bear,
whether it's on the go Shark UV or on all
the different weapons that we're building, that software is exquisite.
I mean, it's absolutely world class. It's like nothing else
in the industrial base, and it's changing constantly, so I
(24:17):
can make that weapon effectively a new weapon each time
I recode it or add new algorithms or add new
software digital capability. When we often talk hardware, that's where
I think when we say exquisite, we're getting into different
kinds of seekers and countermeasures and other kinds of survivability
mechanisms that drive up price, that drive up complexity, that
(24:37):
reduce producibility, that sort of drive out lead times. That's
the kind of stuff that really limits our ability to
produce its scale. In addition to a whole host of
other things get into you know, assembly and manufacturing and
critical materials and things of that sort. But you know,
from the standpoint of what's inside of the systems that
we're building, I mean that software is absolutely exquisite. The
(24:58):
good news is that it changes daily weekly. You can
adapt it to the threats that you're facing, and you're
making that weapon incredibly more intelligent than kind of its
traditional alternative.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
Chris, I want to thank you for joining me and
our listeners can find out more about the incredible work
you're doing by visiting your website at Anderil dot com.
Thank you to my guest, Christian Brose. You can get
a link to Anderill on our show page at newsworld
dot com. News World is produceabley gingishree sixty and iHeartMedia.
(25:30):
Our executive producers guards each loan. Our researcher is Rachel Peterson.
The artwork for the show was created by Steve Fenley.
Special thanks to the team at Ginglish three sixty. If
you've an enjoying Newsworld, I hope you'll go to Apple
Podcasts and both rate us with five stars and give
us a review so others can learn what it's all about.
Right now, listeners of Newsworld can start up for my
(25:52):
three free weekly columns at Ginglish three sixty dot com
slash newsletter. I'm new Ginglish. This is Newsworld.
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