Jared Isaacman

So F-35s were just coming online.

And I remember we had four.

It was supposed to be just a 4v4, which means we should just get killed.

A4s against four F-35s from the Joint Operational Test Team.

And three of the F-35s ground aborted.

So it became a 4v1.

And we had used up the entire airspace.

I mean, we had jets high, low on the deck, and from different angles.

And this one F-35 just went around and made easy work of everyone, just dispatched everyone super quick.

No kidding.

But what...

What I thought over time, and this kind of comes to my only real political position that I really, truly care about, which is just the competitiveness of the nation.

I got concerned when we were coming up with ways that could really create problems for Blue Air.

that if I could afford it, if I could afford to do these things to our aircraft, then certainly the North Koreans could and the Iranians, but definitely the Chinese are going to be able to do it.

And we started to be very dismissive of it as, well, that's not going to be a problem because if it is, we'll do that.

But there were a lot of other scenarios where we didn't apply that kind of thinking or logic to it.

And every year that started to go by, the Chinese threat specifically was getting better and better and better.

I mean, really, over, again, a five-year period of time, you're simulating a MiG-21 to a dramatically improved flanker.

I use kind of the SpaceX example sometimes on it, where when it comes to China, what we think we know is already so dated.

Two years is a long time in that world.