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
And so in a network-denied environment, think about how important connectivity is for all of these systems and how dumb some of them may become in the absence of connectivity. And so... Get ready. The network denial will be the first fulcrum of a full scale near peer war. I mean, look at the contingency in the Ukraine. They wouldn't dream of criticizing Elon because what's their network?
It's Starlink. Starlink is the unsung hero of the Ukrainian contingency. For whatever you think about the proprietor, that contingency would have been lost already without Starlink. And that's a hard network that they can't crack. It's all their comms. It's all of their ability to navigate all of these different new UASs. So...
At its simplest form, it's just the ability for all these things to what we would call C4ISR or C5ISR. It's this command to control of these connected things. And we've designed everything to be connected. And I think the next iteration is going to be these things actually have to be autonomous systems.
and have to have inertial navigation and these other things that, assuming it's flying in the dark, it's not connected to GPS, it's not connected to something else in the ground, it's not connected to a mesh network, it's going to have to have its own situational awareness individually when a network is denied.
Just the ability to pump in an end goal for something to go prosecute it is kind of spectacular. I view it very similar to the paradigm of when we're going to let the Waymos drive us 100% kind of thing. Like, there's going to be this...
push and pull of who's going to grab the yoke on all these activities and i think something that doesn't have well-defined joint doctrine is actually going to do much better with ai because they're more likely to just give it over to them just tell me what to do as opposed to us where we have well-defined protocol and paradigms and we're not going to give over the steering wheel as easily that's harder the fighter pilot union if you will is going to fight pretty hard
about what they do or don't give up. But I wouldn't give up on human ingenuity to hack a system, to screw up a system, to trick a system. I'm not saying we should exclusively rely on that.
My greatest hope is that there's symmetry in the development of these technologies that functionally make them moot for adversaries and us to use, is that we end up in a new form of Cold War. So it's an arms race. It's mutually assured destruction. I think the amazing thing about the Ukrainian contingency is Putin has threatened nuclear activity. How many times? And he hasn't used it.
And so I say to myself, wow, he has this arsenal of nuclear capability and he is not prepared to cross it, even though he almost went through a coup, which Bellingcat accurately predicted. My hope is that if we can develop symmetrical capabilities over time and if one person pulls out too far ahead. then there will be this enormous temptation to flex.
And so that's the challenge in a race to the future is you just can't be second. You just can't. You just can't allow it because the human temptation, war is a human endeavor. And by the way, I should say, I trust the United States, a democracy to be more measured than any other end user of something.
And my hope is that we pull away and that creates the new opportunity for Dayton because I think in an alternative scenario, it'd be a lot more dangerous. What about the other path? The worst is the march of technology puts more and more power in fewer and fewer people's hands.
There are a lot of stories of we run these nuclear drills and then the missileer won't turn the key or something like that. There's a human. And so technology is removing people in a lot of these steps. And then it's also putting these capabilities and things that were exclusively the provenance of nation states. And now it's like it could be a company of 100 people. And so technology
There is a very credible path towards something extremely dangerous happening, and it kicks off a chain reaction that brings us to the precipice. Why are some nations that have resources nuclear and some others not? So ultimately, if you have enough smart people and you have resources, you get the capability. So I really worry about something like that.
And I almost view something like that to a certain extent with the march of technology as... inevitable. And so we're going to have to go back to the physics of it and how we govern it. Like the molecule, that's why these things around it will have to be so important and controlled because if the substrates exist in the system, there'll be enough technology in order to build a capability.
My entire experience is an acquisition. I don't come from the policy and planning world. I don't come from strategy and plans. And there are people in the building that spend their life thinking about these things. I come to it with a merchant's nose of like, what do you need in order to prosecute the mission? I think about it in terms of the long-term impact to our business.
But what's amazing is how wrong the capabilities we impute into an adversary. Look, no one thought the result of the Ukrainian contingency would be this. No one. I forget who attributed the quote, but it says something to the effect of, Surprise attacks are so common, they shouldn't be a surprise. It's kind of like man makes plans and God laughs.
So I feel like there's so much probability distribution in the way a lot of this happens. And the best insurance policy to wrap around all this is technological superiority. And that's why I'm so happy to see the level of energy investment that's going into it.
I view my job as being a good steward of capital for the inputs into a lot of these systems and that we can continue to leverage the capitalistic system to make good returns and to create continuity of supply for the system.
On the professional side, there are two people. So one is my former boss at the Pentagon, Paul Brinkley. And I mean, he was Doge part one, this guy. He just wanted to modernize the place and he didn't care about how much China he broke in order to improve it. And there are very few people like that in a bureaucracy. He accumulated energy off of it. And he wrote a book about it.
It was published by Wiley a number of years ago. And then also Tom Pritzker, who really put me in business. I'd never bought a company before when I left the Pentagon. I don't have an MBA. I never worked at a private equity firm. I never worked as an investor in any kind of capacity. So here's a guy sitting across from you going, okay, you're smart. You can figure out business.
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