Our Military Is Built for the Wrong Century

21:42And then having done that, it needs to be able to communicate with those machines and tell them to keep custody of that target, to keep looking at it, right? To be able to track it through space and time so that the system, the software system, can then task a weapon to go shoot it or defeat if that's the intent of the human operator. So it's just to say that this kind of system is like what the military would refer to as a fire control system, because you are literally controlling acts of violence through software. And this is why, you know, you look at the open AIs and the Googles and others.

22:12I mean, we have natural relationships and partnerships with all these companies. They're incredibly eager to work with us because we have a treasure trove of unique military data that you're not going to go, you know, find in a public setting. You're not going to scrape it off the internet. But you're also building the weapons themselves.

22:29Ross Douthat:Correct. Right. So you're building the model through which soldiers and operators interface with drones and counter drone technology. Yes. But you're also building drones and counter drone technology. We're also building the hardware, right. So describe the hardware, just give me a couple examples, offensive and defensive of the hardware and what like a typical product looks like. Yeah. You know, one of the bigger systems that we're building right now is an Air Force program that we competed on and won called the Collaborative Combat Aircraft, which is a fancy way of saying basically a robotic fighter jet.

23:01So, you know, fully autonomous, launching entirely without human control, you know, maneuvering through the battle space, conducting operations under the supervision of human beings, firing weapons, and again, doing all of this over very long ranges, carrying large amounts of payloads, sensors, weapons, other things. So that is the kind of system that we're building that is both a very unique and sort of differentiated piece of hardware, but what makes it special is everything that is smart and intelligent that's going on inside of it, which is foundational, and that's what the Lattice software system is doing.

23:36Ross Douthat:Is that cheaper than the alternative? Is that an example of the kind of lower cost warfare that you were just talking about? Because that sounds very high end to me. It is high end, but I think this is where - Even exquisite. I wouldn't necessarily, I mean, look, there are many things that we're doing that I would say are exquisite, but that also doesn't mean that they're exorbitant in terms of their price or in terms of the time it takes to produce them or change them or modify them. This is an incredibly capable system, but it is a fraction of the cost of an F-35, for example. And the whole notion is that it is an unmanned or uncrewed or autonomous system so that you can take risk with it that you would never take risk with a$100 million airplane that has a human soul aboard.

24:24So the whole notion is that, again, this isn't a robot that is going to necessarily replace human beings in exquisite military systems. It's going to make those systems more capable and more survivable because you can collaborate with them. You can now just not just send a single pilot in a single fighter jet out to conduct an operation. You can have that pilot flying with three or four or four or five of these robotic wingmen who are now capable of operating as almost kind of, again, wingmen.

24:54Ross Douthat:Why do you need the pilot at all, though? I mean, it seems like we can get into the question of whether you need any humans in the system in a minute. But can't you just, if this works, aren't you replacing at the very least Tom Cruise? I mean, maybe someday. I don't think that's where we are now. And I would argue it's probably not going to be the case that we're going to replace humans entirely down the future. But I think, why do you need humans now? Because the systems are not advanced enough that they can just operate completely without human supervision. You need a human being that is going to be in command of those robotic systems in the way that a human in a fighter jet is going to be collaborating with those robotic aircraft.

25:36Ross Douthat:But is there an advantage specifically to having the human be in the fighter jet with his wingmen? I would argue there is. Or could you have them in the command center piloting from afar? I think that there's an advantage that comes from the human being in that same operational environment, being closer. In a world where we're seeing jamming and denial of communications, the ability to have an aircraft that is physically in communications with those airplanes, even as they are operating in highly autonomous ways, I do think is a necessity in terms of how we are going to think about just the ethics of this or the ethical use of this technology.

26:18I think that's important. I also think the military advantage is you look at this more, I look at this more as the augmentation of human beings with intelligent systems or robotic systems. But ultimately, it's not a question of is the human better or is the machine better? It is, is the human-machine team actually more effective than either the robot or the human by itself? And I think a lot of the analysis that we've run, a lot of the analysis that we've seen from the government is that is absolutely the case.

26:47Ross Douthat:What about on defense? In terms of both drone and missile defense? Give me an example of work you're doing. So we build, so air defense is just an inherently integrated problem, which is why it's referred to as integrated air and missile defense. You are basically needing to do what I was describing a minute ago, which is you have to complete actual kill chains. So the ability to understand what's happening in the environment, be able to identify and target the systems that you want to defeat, and then be able to task weapons or military effects, kinetic or non-kinetic, to defeat those threats, and do all of that in a matter of seconds, like to operate it at a speed that a human being is not going to be able to keep up with.

27:33One of the systems that has done remarkably well in protecting American bases and American aircraft in Operation Epic Fury is the electronic warfare system that we build called Pulsar. We also have -

27:47Ross Douthat:And what is that? So take that example. That is, you're trying to defend, let's say, a U.S. base in the Middle East, right? So that is trying to shoot down both missiles and drone attacks? So this is doing this in what the military would refer to as non-kinetically. Okay, but how would you or I refer to it? It is preventing a weapon from being able to strike its target by using energy, using the electromagnetic spectrum to disrupt its operations. At the most basic level, that is what it is. And to get more technical, it begins to sound like witchcraft because it mostly is. So you're not firing interceptors.

28:25Ross Douthat:No, I was going to say, we're also doing that. Right. So basically, this is a military interceptor that is going to launch from a base that is going to fly out in much the same way that an air defense weapon will. It is going to be able to identify a target. It's going to be able to physically run into it and explode and knock it out of the air. Say a little more about the witchcraft, though. So let's say I'm running a U.S. military base in the Middle East, right? And I have a set of drones, Iranian drones heading towards me. So on the one hand, I have as weapons, as countermeasures, right, my set of maybe ideally reusable rockets that will intercept and take them down.

29:11Ross Douthat:And so some subset of the incoming fire is taken out by that. And then some subset is disrupted through electromagnetic fields. Yeah, it's basically, you know, it's what the military would refer to as a layered defense, right? I think that traditionally we've thought of air and missile defense as very point specific. I'm trying to defend a very small piece of real estate, you know, military base, and the volume of threats that I have to defend it against is not very large. And I think what we've seen is that with the proliferation of these one-way attack drones in Ukraine, in Iran, air defense is shifting into more area defense.

29:52You have to be able to protect very large areas of territory, whole cities, whole regions. And it just requires a much larger volume of sensors, a far larger volume of weapons. And it basically requires you to integrate everything. So the first thing that you're going to do is not, once you see an air defense threat, once you see an inbound missile or a one-way attack drone, the first thing, hopefully, is not shoot a Patriot missile at it. You're going to deploy something like what I'm talking about in the Pulsar system, which is an electronic warfare system. It's reusable. You know, it is essentially trying to defeat inbound threats with jamming, with energy.

30:29Ross Douthat:So it's not, is it shooting something up? No, it is a directed energy weapon. It's creating fields around? It's a force field, Ross. It is effectively a force field. That's what I want you to say. There you go. So, you know, for the listeners, it is a force field. We have done it. You know, the next up will be cloaking devices. But no, this is... But it functions like there is a zone of electromagnetic interference and missiles or drones enter this. It's more targeted at that, right? It's not trying to basically just pump huge volumes of energy out into the environment and do kind of broad spectrum jamming.

31:06Ross Douthat:And then so then the second layer would be things that come in. If that didn't work for some reason, then you start shooting. But this is what's being used now? This is being used now. Okay. You know, across the world. Is it used in, like, for instance, Israel's Iron Dome? Does Israel's Iron Dome use the directed energy? We are not currently a part of their program, but I have to imagine that Israel has similar capabilities that they're fielding as part of Iron Dome. And long run, be speculative, just this is obviously designed for base defense. In Israel's case, you have missile defense geared around cities and regions.

31:45Ross Douthat:Do you imagine this long term as sort of a version of or an upgrade of missile defense for the American homeland? Like, is there a world where this ends up being sort of a means of derailing a nuclear attack? Or is that just sort of in a completely different realm of threat? The nuclear realm is just a wholly different animal. But in terms of being able to protect military bases or critical infrastructure from drone attacks here in the United States, we're doing a lot of that work as a company. The electronic warfare system that I mentioned is part of that work, but it's a much larger problem that, again, gets back into how do we do this kind of air defense mission at scale.

32:27Ross Douthat:How hard is it to get this to actually work? And here I'm just going to throw at you, and you can respond to any of them, some examples of publicly reported Anduril failures, right? So there's reporting that Ukraine used some of your drones and then stopped using them after a certain period of time because there were battlefield failures. There are specific case studies like one of your counter drone system tests in Oregon reportedly sparked a 22 acre wildfire. There was a engine related failure to one of your autonomous fighter prototypes, Fury. Those would be examples, right? How well does this stuff work and how hard is it to get it to actually work?

33:07Yeah, I mean, without relitigating the individual incidents, because the engine fire just didn't happen. And that was something that we corrected the misimpression that a reporter had because it had been fed wrong information. How about the bigger point is like, we fail every single day, right? I mean, that's like the tip of the iceberg in terms of the failures that we experience as a company. But that's, I think, the whole point here. The answer to your question of how hard it is to make this stuff work is incredibly hard. It is far harder than people realize. And for that reason, we have invested as a company.

33:44This is our own money. This is not money that the taxpayer is funding us to do. At this point, I think we have about 330 ,000 acres of test sites and ranges across the United States.

33:57Ross Douthat:Where are those? Undisclosed locations. Okay. Mostly in the West? In places where you can afford to have large amounts of space. Not in Connecticut, just from my own. No. Okay. But if you want to open a test site in Connecticut, Ross, we should talk. Okay. It can be your side hustle. It's to say that, you know, we go out every single day and break these systems. We figure out what their capabilities and limitations are. We develop them to the point where they are going to be, you know, trusted by an operator that's going to use them. But even then, the expectation cannot be that when a system shows up in Ukraine, it's going to work immediately.

34:33And I think that is an experience that any company that has been operating in Ukraine since, you know, the beginning of the war, which we have and the military systems that we've been fielding are still in operations in Ukraine. No one has had an experience where they fielded something that has just been perfect and worked out of the box. And to the extent that it did, it didn't work a week later or a month later or a couple of months after that. And I think, again, the whole lesson of this is not, you know, can we build a perfect piece of technology? It is, do we actually have the right institutional culture or organizational culture where we are learning, we are testing, we are training these systems, we are building trust in them, we are enabling operators to build trust in them.

35:12And then when When those systems don't work because they won't, because of things that new technology makes possible or responses that our adversaries engage in, we have to be able to modernize those systems and improve them and change them and rebuild them. And that's what we do every single day. We're integrating new sensors and new payloads onto these systems. We're rebuilding entire systems altogether at a hardware level, entirely new versions of aircraft and other things.

35:39Ross Douthat:And actual war is an accelerant, right? I mean, both the Ukraine war and the Iran war are accelerants of this technology's development. Yes. At least it should be. At a technical level, it's an accelerant because you are in a non-fail environment where you have to perform and you have to get better and it's all mission critical. And that kind of incentive is exactly the kind of pressure that we want to be under. Because at the end of the day, we are building autonomous systems. systems and, you know, autonomous systems are by nature, very finicky, right? I mean, you know, we, you take them into one environment and they perceive the world differently.

36:15You take them into a different environment and you have to do a certain amount of retraining. All of this ultimately comes down to the trust that human beings are going to place in them. So if those systems are not predictable and reliable, if they don't do things in a repeated and sort of high trust way, operators are just not going to use them, right? There's no points for being autonomous. There's points for being effective and for being useful. Autonomy is a means to that end in our mind.

36:38Ross Douthat:What about the capacity to build the kind of things you're building at scale? You're one company, right? You said earlier, basically, that under current conditions, we can spend a lot of money and the existing legacy weapon systems we have, we just don't get that large a number of missiles and so on, right? Does the U.S. have the existing industrial capacity to build out autonomous weapons, drones and other things on the scale that we need in an environment where you've just said that we aren't maybe well positioned to win a major war? Yeah, I think the answer is yes and no. I think the yes answer is we absolutely have the ability to stand up industrial infrastructure, you know, bring the workforce in.

37:26I mean, These are not problems that we're concerned about. We just closed another fundraising round, so we're taking in$5 billion of private capital.

37:34Ross Douthat:And this is something, by the way, you mentioned earlier the venture capital role here. This is a different model from the traditional defense contractor. Yes. Right, where you are effectively raising money, building weapons, and presenting them to the Pentagon before a contract is signed? In part that. There are plenty of instances where we have conviction in a solution that needs to be built to solve a military or national security problem, and we go out and do exactly that. We put our own money at risk, we spin up a team, we build a system, and we take that system to the government and say, you probably wouldn't have come up with this on your own, but we think that it is an answer to your problem.

38:12As we've become a larger company, we've also had to kind of change the business model and engage in different bets, which I would argue makes it start to look much more like the commercial economy that we're all familiar with, which is if you give me a contract to build weapons, the traditional way of doing it is the government is going to pay the provider of that traditional weapon all of the costs to build their facilities, to hire their people, to cover the overruns when the program goes over budget and off schedule. the taxpayers on the hook for all of that. And the industry partner really isn't bearing a lot of that risk.

38:49I think what is changing now, and I think Andrel has done a lot to change it, but I also give a lot of credit to the current leadership of the Pentagon that's trying to change this business model as well. Let's try to make this more like a commercial transaction where I sell weapons and you want weapons. You give me a contract to build a lot of weapons, I'm going to go off and build those weapons. If I am off schedule or if I underperform or if I'm behind, that's all on me. And I'm the one that has to eat the cost of that failure in order to meet the obligations of my contract. So the same way that you would put a roof on your house or go buy a piece of electronics technology.

39:29Ross Douthat:Except that unless you start selling to other countries, it's a market with only one buyer. Right. It is. Which means that you are, as a company, in a position where you are sort of at the mercy of political changes, political decisions. I want to ask about this because Palantir, again, has a higher profile than you do and has a specific political profile. There's lots of people who hate and fear Palantir who associate it with sort of general fears about the surveillance state, but also specific fears or concerns about its alignment with Republican politics, the Trump administration and so on.

40:06Ross Douthat:I think this is less of an issue for Anderil, but your, see, I did the Tolkien pronunciation there, but your prominent founder, Palmer Luckey, is a prominent Republican. Obviously, there is overlap with Palantir. You yourself have mentioned it. You have one of the funds investing in you is connected to Donald Trump Jr. Is there a world where your business model just goes away in a democratic administration? Because it's like Anderil, those were the Trump guys. Or the Pete Hegseth guys, right? Like how vulnerable are you to politics? No, I personally don't think that we are that vulnerable. I think that from day one, we've recognized that Anderil is a defense company.

40:52And defense is a long game. And you have to be able to play that long game, not knowing what the future politics of the country are going to hold. This is, for us, politics is something that, you know, individuals can engage in. And, you know, Palmer certainly has his political profile. Our CEO is a very public and avowed Democrat. You know, I have no idea what I am anymore. But it's to say that it doesn't matter, right? Because at the end of the day, what we're focused on as a company, we are actually engaged in a bipartisan way across both houses of Congress, both parties, to provide an enduring capacity in this country to build the kinds of defense technologies and capabilities that I think on both sides of the aisle people want.

41:38Ross Douthat:So let's say that vision is right, and you become an enduring part of the defense industrial base, and the next president is a Democrat, doesn't matter, you're doing the work you want to do, and we get into the early 2030s, and we get a war with China over Taiwan. Just give me a brief vision of what Anderil's success looks like in that environment. Like, what actually happens? Yeah. It is first and foremost, right? Let's say the actual success that we measure ourselves by as a company is whether we prevent that war from ever happening. Sure. I know you get it. Table stakes, right? But it needs to be said, right?

42:23Because look, we are a defense company. We do build military technology. But we're not excited for it to be -

42:28Ross Douthat:Then put it this way. Describe the scenario that China would fear that would induce them not to go to war. Yeah. So some specific things, because I think the specifics are what is interesting. Ultimately, we want to contribute to America's ability to defeat their strategy. And what their strategy is, I think, not reading their kind of internal emails or what have you, is they want to prevent us from being able to project power. They want to prevent us from being able to come to the aid of our allies and partners in the region, whether it's Taiwan, Japan, or someone else. And they want to be able to endure through, you know, what could be a protracted conflict by keeping us out of it.

43:09Ross Douthat:And that means concretely they want to initially destroy our bases and drive our aircraft carriers out of the region. They say it very clearly. They say it is winning without fighting. They want to prevent us from being able to fight. And that is the sort of deep disruption that has been happening to the United States military for the past 30 to 35 years. China went to school on us in terms of how we fight and with what we fight. And they have been building up and modernizing a military to hold all of that at risk. So specifically, what we want to be able to do is we want to be able to break that advantage.

43:41We want to make the bases and ships and aircraft carriers that are going to be under threat in that region defensible, having larger numbers of robotic systems that are purpose built for the Indo-Pacific region, right? So I think a lot of people look at the war in Ukraine and say, on the one hand, we just need to buy everything that the Ukrainians are building, quadcopters and others. Or on the other hand -

44:03Ross Douthat:Or have the Taiwanese buy them, right? Well, I'll get to the Taiwan question and the allied question in a second. But the criticism of people who over-index on the war in Ukraine is, oh, none of this stuff is relevant in the Indo-Pacific region. The distances are too vast. The geography is so large. The threat from the Chinese is so much greater. And there's a degree to which that's true. I think the point is that what we actually need to be doing is I think what we're doing as a company, which is not just carbon copying what the Ukrainians are doing, but learning the lessons of that battlefield and the attributes of those technologies and building different kinds of military systems that are purpose built for the United States and its allies for different geographies and for a far higher bar of threat that we would be facing from, you know, from the Chinese Communist Party.

44:48And then I think specifically to your question about Taiwan, because these are the places where you have the flashpoints of conflict where a conflict might emerge. I think that we have to do our best to support the Taiwanese government in making themselves more defensible, making themselves into the kind of adversary that is so distasteful that the Chinese military, the Chinese political leadership just doesn't want to take that on.

45:15Ross Douthat:And that means like drone swarms when you have an attempted amphibious landing. Yeah, making them more defensible from the types of inbound missiles, cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, one-way attack drones that they're going to be faced with, giving them the ability to defend against and sort of endure that sort of onslaught, the ability to project power in a way that keeps them in the fight. And that is work that Andrew is doing. I mean, we're providing that capability, obviously, with the U.S. government's blessing directly to the Taiwanese armed forces. And it's something that we intend to do a lot more, provided that they have the will and the means and the U.S.

45:56government continues to back us in doing that.

46:07Ross Douthat:Hi, this is Ashley. I live in San Francisco with my boyfriend. We would love to officially share my New York Times subscription with separate logins. We both love cooking, love being in the kitchen, but I'm a 30-minute and under efficient dinner girly. I want a sheet pan meal. He is very elaborate. He wants to get into the storytelling. I want to be able to save my easy meals and check off the ones that I've completed. And I think him having his own profile would be great. Ashley, we heard you. It's why we created the New York Times Family subscription. You get your own login and Mr. Elaborate gets his.

46:43Plus room for two others. Find out more at nytimes.com slash family.

46:51Ross Douthat:All right, let's end with the ethics of this strange new world. You talked earlier about emphasizing the idea of keeping humans in the loop, keeping humans involved. What are your actual core principles as a company when it comes to what is allowed to happen autonomously in a conflict area? My general frustration with the ethical debate right now is that it feels very kind of unsophisticated and stale. You know, I think on the one side you have folks who basically are looking at the reality of the security dilemma that we face, which is our adversaries are going to do all of this. They're going to build these autonomous systems.

47:30They're going to take human beings out of the loop and they're going to gain a military advantage. And if we don't do that, you know, we'll be we'll be on our back foot. And there's a degree to which that's real. Is it, by the way, just in the case of Ukraine right now, you have drones killing people without a human in the loop, right?

47:48Ross Douthat:Already? Again, I don't know everything that's going on there. I actually think a lot of what you've seen more recently is you don't have that. You have drones that are being piloted by very capable drone pilots that are the ones flying them into their targets, whether those targets are people, soldiers, you know, or military systems. I don't think that you are seeing a large amount of automation yet on the battlefield, but I think that too could change. You know, that if the Ukrainians start building up more of an internal capacity to shoot deep, right, to shoot longer range, one-way attack drones in volume deeper into Russia, you're probably going to have to automate more of the operations of those systems.

48:28Ross Douthat:And you're just sending, then you would be just sending them out and saying, go until you see something to kill and kill it. That is a version of it. Yeah. I think that the, and again, I think to go back to your question about the ethics, I think on the other side is folks who look at this and say, this technology is so new, it's so unprecedented that we just have to ban it outright. We just have to never go there. And I think that that's also not a sophisticated position. And I think that what, to answer your question directly, what I think we try to stay focused on as a company is the reality that over the past decades, and I would argue centuries, you know, Western civilization, the United States in particular, has built up a body of laws and, you know, policies and doctrine that enables us to bring brand new technology into military use to weaponize it and to use it.

49:22use it in a way that is still ethically constrained and thought about in a serious and ethical way. What we need to be doing a better job of as a country is not throwing out this remarkable body of sort of ethical thinking and action and doctrine that we've built up, but actually applying it to govern how these technologies are being built and introduced to military operations. Because I think that there's nothing to me that is so new and so unique and so unprecedented about these technologies that the sort of ethical frameworks that we have brought to bear to solve past problems can't enable us to solve these future problems.

49:58Ross Douthat:That's okay. That's very general, though. I want you to make this concrete. What are the current existing constraints on what the Pentagon, what's your understanding of the constraints on what the Pentagon allows a drone or an autonomous weapon to do without a human deciding, kill this person, shoot this person? So if you look at the actual policy, it's a very serious document, but it's also quite broad, and it would account for a lot of things. And I actually think that's right and well and good. I think that people also need to realize - Wait, wait, wait. But what does it say? I know it's very broad, but is there a specific - The more important thing is what it doesn't say, right?

50:39It doesn't say you're not allowed to automate the kill chain. It doesn't say that you're not allowed to build a military system that is capable of basically being a lethal autonomous weapon. So you're allowed to do that? You are not not allowed to do that. I think what the point is, is that people also have to appreciate that bureaucracies by nature and military bureaucracies in particular are inherently conservative. And I think that it's a fundamental misunderstanding. And I'm not saying that you're guilty of this, but I think that many are. It is a misunderstanding.

51:15Ross Douthat:I could be guilty of it. That's okay. It's a misunderstanding of our defense institution that they're just going to take a bunch of unproven technology and then willy-nilly kind of throw it onto the battlefield and see what happens. Because at the end of the day, what they are accountable for and the consequences of their work is life and death, not just life and death with respect to enemy combatants, civilians, but also for our own personnel. You don't want a weapon system that malfunctions. You don't want a drone or an autonomous system that hallucinates. So there is a process that all new technology has to go through.

51:50And I think that it is going to be no different in the case of these kinds of more highly intelligent, highly autonomous robotic systems where you are going to rigorously train them to do very specific things. You're going to test them to determine that they actually perform those tasks the right way, effectively, repeatedly, predictably. And in the process of that training and testing, you're going to build trust that those systems are safe to use and effective to use.

52:16Ross Douthat:And where in that process do you determine where the moral line is for letting robots kill people? So to take a specific sort of point of differentiation, how I would answer your question would be very different in a defensive application of this technology than an offensive application. If I'm going to take a highly intelligent machine and send it downrange to go hunt targets and basically make its own decisions about what to do, what to shoot, etc., there's going to be a far higher bar applied to letting that system go off and do those things than a similar system would be if it were employed in a defensive setting, like an air defense application we talked about, where the risk of not doing that is that the human beings that are under threat from those inbound missiles will be too slow and too incapable of being able to defend themselves.

53:08So you're going to be far more willing to put that kind of advanced technology into a defensive use case because you are literally protecting human life as opposed to an offensive case where you're sending that system out to take human life.

53:22Ross Douthat:Is there a world where the military for offensive warfare has a policy that human beings have to be in the loop. But in effect, this technology is so fast and you're sort of caught up in the operations of artificial intelligence and autonomous weapons that the human being ends up being just sort of a rubber stamp, right? I mean, because that seems like a possible future too, that you technically maintain humans in the kill chain, but in practice, you never want to be the mid-level soldier who says no to what the AI is telling you to do, right? Yeah. I think here too, I mean, it's also highly contextual.

54:04Like, I absolutely can imagine a world where we build lethal autonomous weapons and we use them exactly as you were describing. You know, again, back to this ethical framework. When the United States military goes to war, we will declare what are called areas of active hostilities. And what you're saying to the world is, this is a war zone. Do not go there. If you're a commercial fisherman or a commercial mariner, do not take your ship through there. Do not fly your aircraft through there, because this is going to be an area where we are lowering the bar for how we are going to use violence, or we are going to delegate more of our military operations to intelligent machines in order to gain that advantage or not lose that advantage.

54:54But you are doing so in a context that you've created that gives you much higher assurance that you're not going to be making mistakes, killing civilians, killing your own people. And again, I think this is where, like, I apologize for continuing to come back to the context and the specifics, but I think that's where all the devils lie in these kinds of ethical discussions of these new technologies.

55:16Ross Douthat:So then two last questions on that, just from your perspective as someone who is making weapons for the military, but you do not work for the military. Does the private company that does this kind of work with the military just have to accept as the basis for doing business that you are trusting the military in these specific circumstances, right? And because this is obviously something that's come up a lot with the big AI companies, which are not defense contractors, but now kind of are defense contractors and famously Anthropic maybe had problems with how the Pentagon might use its AI and this led to conflict between the Pentagon and Anthropic.

55:58Ross Douthat:What's your view of the place of the company, the private company doing this work in thinking about how the weapons are actually used? Yeah. I think working with or working for the government is kind of an all or nothing venture. And I think that's how it should be. I don't think that we ever want the builders of technology in America to basically enact a veto over how our government is using that technology. I think that is a decision that needs to remain in the hands of the American people and their elected representatives. And I think that for companies that want to work with the government, that's what you're signing up for.

56:35You are signing up for the belief that working for our government is inherently good. It is something that is necessary and right. And that you are believing that the government is going to be following the laws of the land. It's going to be constrained by the checks and balances of the constitution and our other institutions of government. But that you can't show up and try to sort of veto individual use cases, right? As a builder of weapons in the United States, you know, I can't show up to the Pentagon and say, you can buy my weapons, but you can't give them to Israel. You can't shoot them in Yemen.

57:12You can't provide them to the American military in Operation Epic Fury or share them to the Taiwanese or the Europeans. You basically have to say, look, I am here to provide a capability or a service, and I am trusting that the government is going to – they're going to make policy. They're going to follow the law. They're going to be checked and balanced and constrained by the other institutions of our government. And that's, I think, what you're signing up for. If a private actor, a company, or a person doesn't believe that they can support their government in that way, providing them that technology or service, the right thing to do is just to walk away, right, to not to do that work.

57:49And there are plenty of companies in America that choose not to engage in defense or choose not to provide capability to the government. And that is, I think, an absolutely ethically supportable decision. And I think it's a good thing that in America, we have that choice. We have that luxury. I think where Anthropic went wrong, and there's plenty of blame to go around. But I don't believe we want these kinds of technology companies to include us at Anderil showing up and trying to dictate to our elected representatives, our leaders, our Senate-confirmed officials, and ultimately the American people, what they can and can't do with the technologies that we're building.

58:30Ross Douthat:Stipulating that that's true and that that's just inevitably going to be the necessary approach that you take. I'm just curious as a last question, whether there's anything concrete that you fear with this technology. And I'll just say as context, the pattern in major wars in most of human history, especially where technology is involved, is you get in a major war, it goes on a long time and you escalate the use of new technology to a threshold of moral danger. And this could be poison gas in World War I. It could be the strategic bombing of cities and the use of nuclear weapons in World War II.

59:11Ross Douthat:There are other examples, right? But it seems very imaginable to me that you get in a major war with autonomous weapons and a system of moral constraint that works right now starts to go out the window. And I'm just curious to end, are you ever afraid of where the things you're building could be taken? I think you have to be. And it would be irresponsible if you weren't, for me or for anybody who is working in this area of technology, to fear the sort of future use cases that these systems could be put to or the ways in which they would develop. But I think to your question about those future scenarios, at the end of the day, the only thing we can focus on is building the best technology that we're capable of building to support the United States, our government, our allies and partners, recognizing that the future use cases, the context, all of these things are going to change and be different.

1:00:07And it's hard to answer your question in the abstract because a few years prior to World War II, if anyone could even contemplate an atomic bomb, it would be hard to imagine that someone would support that as an ethical use. The point being is that these things remain highly contextual. And sort of what you are willing to condone and what you're willing to do is going to change based on the circumstances you find yourselves in. And I think the only thing that you can do as a builder of technology is, again, provide the best capability that you can, keep the United States and our allies and partners on the cutting edge of technology to try to ensure that those wars never happen.

1:00:45But in the event that, God forbid, we find ourselves in them, recognize that those are going to be the decisions that the elected representatives of the American people are going to have to make under very difficult circumstances. And we pray they get them right.

1:00:59Ross Douthat:All right. Chris Brose, thanks for joining me. Thank you. Great to be here.

1:01:20Thank you.