Ethan Thornton

speaker

1,249 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 4 Aug

Ethan Thornton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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But they only push it as far as like five or six companies.

And I think that is the most consolidated we'll see.

And so I think five or six is probably even –

maybe on the order of the right number of like actual big integrators.

But you definitely don't want to go below that.

And I think that the Pentagon has understood that and continues to understand that.

I think the biggest difference is cost plus contracting.

Right.

So there's this narrative a while ago, which actually makes sense at first glance.

That is, we don't want defense contractors to become wildly rich selling stuff to the taxpayer.

And that's like a great thesis.

And I completely agree with with sort of the contours of that thesis.

The way they enforce that was by setting basically a cost plus contract, which is you're responsible for delivering this.

You will get paid X percent of your costs on the program.

Yes, your profit margin is fixed.

Regardless of if you spend 500 million or a billion or 1.5 billion, you're taking, let's say, a 20% cut.

Okay.

Well, the incentive structure, if you're a company in that...

Now, ideally, a lot of us want to actuate our companies differently, but these are public companies over multi-decade timelines.

These companies end up spending a lot more money than they need to because by spending more money, they make more money.

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