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.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
But if it's trying to display something existing and the Pentagon's built the requirement, they're saying, this is what I need. Well, it's going to be an enormous capital lift for someone to spend investors' dollars to say, you're wrong, and my taste is better than your requirement. By the way, I don't view that as necessarily a bad setup.
I think this is a whole separate line of the conversation, this concept of a responsible party. And we have that in the nuclear navy, and we should talk about that. But the net-net is, in terms of capital allocation, the manner in which the market behaves is
And the fact that we have these pre-existing capabilities that we're still connected to is going to require a major change in acquisition, a major change in requirement activity. And I believe the big change that should happen should be, quote unquote, the responsible party who gets to own all the fame and the blame for an activity in order to move it forward. And that's because...
What we call riptoa and the transfer of authority, you're typically in a job for 24 months when you wear a uniform. You don't get to see the fruition. The guy that started on Joint Strike Fighter didn't deliver Joint Strike Fighter. We've gone through a slew of flag officers. And so Admiral Rickover...
invented the nuclear navy this is a guy from world war ii and is the longest serving flag officer in american military history served until his late 70s or even his 80s and never wore a uniform by the way was total iconoclast is that he's like we have to have a responsible party and so the job is going to be eight years for the guy running the nuclear navy we don't have that anywhere else in the service and by the way the navy declined to promote this guy over and over again
And the Senate and Scoop Jackson said, no, you're gonna make him an admiral. Now you're gonna make him a two star. You make him a three star. You make him a four star. And so the institution fought back tooth and nail to stop this. But that's a wonderful gift he gave the Navy to create. We've never had an incident in our nuclear Navy.
running reactors that move with tons of kinetic stuff around it all over the world. It's an amazing statement of, we have to create responsible parties. These billets have to be responsible for the delivery of the program. If we take someone and say, you're responsible for drone's 10-year job, well, I think we'll see some major change.
And so if it's a way station along the way, then the current system will crowd out the ability for these new businesses to be successful.
Part of it is so much of this is history of the way we've set up the rotation of how we train people. All of these things come from good places, by the way. I should say that there are very intelligent, motivated people in the armed services and everyone goes into that building wanting to do the right thing. And so this came from the concept of a well-rounded leader is going to do a lot of jobs.
Think about it in a corporation. OK, you can do finance, can do operations, you know, be in marketing. You're going to understand the enterprise that you manage. And so in a limited life, can't leave someone in the gig for eight years or 10 years or something like that.
But in these engineering disciplines and where the hybrid of science and engineering is extremely important to build technological superiority, it's clear we need more responsible parties in the nuclear Navy shows that it absolutely shows it. So.
I think we're going to have to recognize that our only chance of technological superiority is going to have to change the paradigm of the way we've done it in the past. And we can do that. We've changed it before. We'll change it again.
In the venture side is that if you were to draw it as a tree diagram, it's like we were talking about a large institutional LP that we both know. And I thought, I bet they have more GP relationships in defense venture than they actually have defense venture investments because they're all flowing back into the same deals. And so I actually believe that to be true.
It seems like the capital aggregators, the ones that are getting the enormous capital, will probably be able to live out any design or economic cycle here to be able to ultimately come out the other end and be okay. And so I think resources really matters. And I think that's what you see happen in these valuations is that accumulating more resources is a form of industrial power.
I don't think it's surprise that after Andrew's latest raise, they announced a million square foot facility. They're building industrial capacity. That's part of aggregating lots of resources is becoming so important from an industrial standpoint that we got to keep it alive.
And there's a lot of businesses like that that have existed for 50, 7,500 years within the country that support the department. So you can see that. Those guys win. And the ones that aren't well capitalized, irrespective of their technology, won't survive because it's not about making one new widget. It's about making millions of widgets at scale. And so I see what Andrew is doing.
I'm like, OK, I think they're thinking about this correctly. You've aggregated these resources. You must build the industrial capacity because when push comes to shove, it's going to be the ability to produce X number of whatever at scale.
I never say never, because maybe there's someone so brilliant that's figured out how to turn apple juice into rocket fuel or something like that. There's a huge technological phase shift. But if I'm betting defense venture dollars, I'm going to the largest rounds, the largest raises, the largest balance sheets, almost separate from the technology.
I think the balance sheet of these businesses is so important, how big they get, because they will be able to survive and then hopefully some of them will be able to thrive. That's it. There's a ballooning effect to the big firms that can write these big checks and be there to support them.
Some of these primes are very impressive to me. Northrop Grumman's business is remarkably impressive and the executives know their business. So I don't, the nation's only maker of missile fuel for a number of years. It's the only maker of the intermediate chemicals too, which is actually very important. I've seen some business plans that they're going to make.
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