Darren Farber
speaker
722 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 26 May
Darren Farber’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And I think a lot of people have problems with the form, but the substance is absolutely meritorious. You just can't argue with it. Because I live in suburban Washington. I'm blown away how the narrative of... Government's inefficient has totally captured the zeitgeist of the entire Beltway. And six months ago, no one was talking about it. No one.
No one was talking about the general inefficiency of government. And now both sides of the aisle agree that the broader government's extremely inefficient. And so that's amazing to me how the social zeitgeist can just change and move in this direction. But I think these are very necessary events. I think it's a good thing.
It's really a function of what our allies will be able to construct and build. We have a line of sight to this in the AUKUS partnership that we have with Australia and New Zealand. We're going to maintain... an entire nuclear capability in Australia. And it's clear that that's the bug out point for a war with China. It's not going to be Guam.
I was in an unclass briefing the other day in the Pentagon. The stockpiles that China has, Guam is not a... It's insufficient standoff in order to be protected. We can't project enough force from there. And so Australia becomes the new jump off point. The battle plans have been set and we've given the Australians this huge capability and we expect them...
to start spending and we're sending our subs there and they're going to maintain them. And so part of it can be maintenance of a capability we already have, and then they contribute to that activity. And the other part is de novo capability. So look, aircraft carriers, nuclear subs, The three-prong nuclear deterrent, those things take a long time.
I suspect we're going to keep a lot of that capability. But smaller stuff like anything autonomous in the water, hypersonics, these kinds of things that have a new development tail where the per unit cost for development is lower. I see the Europeans doing a lot there because they can manage the full life cycle of that. Nuclear subs, huge effort. But look, the Brits have nuclear capability.
The French have nuclear capability. But until they actually have a cooperative agreement for how they're going to run a joint military, I think it's hard to pinpoint. They can build tanks, small caliber munition. Look, all the sidearms for the U.S. Army historically were European guns. Beretta, Sig Sauer, they weren't even American guns. So the Europeans on a per unit basis will do a lot.
I just think when the system becomes very pristine and big, it's clear that if it's still needed in the doctrine of force structure, that we're probably going to have to do it.
Yeah, massing is just the quantum you can produce in order to win the war. And so America won World War II by virtue of its enormous industrial capacity. And so... I always say, if America galvanizes on something, it's unbelievable to me what it can produce. But China has built a stockpile of conventional weapons that it would take us decades of production in order to build.
They have 250 times our naval capability in construction. Today, you're not possibly going to catch up in any legitimate timeframe. And so... I think we're going to win through technology. I also think that capitalism is this huge advantage that we have here in America because we call on the capitalistic system in order to deliver the goods to the department.
The department really doesn't make anything. It's buying it from companies. And so the dynamism in the American capitalistic system is the edge and that we can tap into forever. private markets and the commercial market in order to do adaptation of these technologies. And then also we're creating a profit incentive for people.
Look at all the Chinese generals that have gone to jail over and over again because they check the ICBMs and they're filled with water because no one in that Industrial complex has a financial incentive in the same way. And what's interesting is I was with a prominent Chinese businessman a few weeks ago and I asked him, I said, there's been this shift here in the U.S.
where young people want to go into defense technology outside of the five-sided building, as we call it. Is there an analog in China? He goes, oh, no. He goes, Chinese entrepreneurs want to tap into the American market. They want to be able to sell their product. It's so funny. The young people there are just as capitalistic, but the incentive structure in the PLA is not there.
And so I think that's a huge edge for us. I also think our ability to fight joint warfare. is a huge edge for us for now. Describe what that means. Every war we fight is joint in that it's all the services together integrated, working together. And it's widely regarded that the PLA and their setup, there's an enormous lack of trust up and down the chain of command.
There's a worry about corruption. And so Even in the vertical of the individual chain of command, let's say in their army or in their air force, it becomes even harder when you have to have a joint operation. And we went through this here in the United States.
We had this thing called Goldwater-Nichols, which said, if you're going to be a commander in the military, 06 or above, you're going to get a joint assignment. We're going to make this service joint so we can fully project the power of each branch of the service. And we work in concert together. We're not competing with each other. The Chinese have never fought a joint war.
They have these branches of services. They built all this technological capability, but their ability necessarily to exercise in this joint concept is very unclear, especially when there's low trust in command and control. So the flip side to that is I could see a scenario where the Chinese hand over command and control to an AI to overcome
The institutional resistance and the lack of trust up and down and across the branches of services, because that thing would be dispassionate and would start tasking it. And I actually think that they have a much stronger incentive to push the bleeding edge there of adaptation, of planning the war with AI, because they're fundamentally less joint. They're not trained in a joint way.
Because they have to rely on it more, that adaptation may happen faster. Whereas we have a very successful joint capability. And so maybe we'll be less inclined to change. That's what I worry about now is this new capability of a thinking machine. But maybe it can overcome the institutional weakness of their military.
I think it's going to be extremely hard for us to stop the Chinese from a Taiwanese invasion. And I asked a former secretary of defense probably two or three months ago, I said, do we have a moral obligation to defend Taiwan? Not... Can we do it tactically? Because that's always an engineering problem and a massing problem and a planning problem.
Showing 581–600 of 722 · page 30 of 37
← Previous
Next →