Jared Isaacman

So now I was getting into like dealing with governments, which meant everything I learned in business, you just throw out.

Cause this is nobody, no, nothing makes sense in this world anymore.

Everybody's motivations are different.

Um, and when you're buying fighter jets from other countries, by the way, like people can talk about, you know, our government is corrupt.

Our government is not corrupt compared to any of these other countries that you're out there doing business with where, uh, you know, it is, you got to jump through some hoops to be able to buy military hardware from there.

But, um, it was a, uh, yeah, I mean, it was a, it was a great learning experience, put it that way.

Yeah, sure.

So we, our job was basically to be professional bad guys.

So, you know, or the op four, if you will, or aggressors, these are all, you know, kind of the terms that would be used.

So the history behind this is the US used to have organic aggressor capability, and they still do.

But they used to have a lot more of it in the during the Cold War.

And, and the reason was, is they could use their own aircraft to do it, generally speaking.

And in order to handicap

like, say, an F-16 so that it could simulate, I don't know, a MiG-29, for example.

in the early 2000s and the 90s, maybe they wouldn't use Afterburner.

Or maybe they would set their radar scope to like a 40-mile scope or something.

And everybody still got good training out of it.

The pilot who was being the red air, the Russian or the Chinese or the Iranian or something, was still getting good training out of it.

The problem that started to develop over the last 15 years or so when we created this business in 2011

is the fourth-gen platforms like F-15, F-16, F-18 were reaching the end of their service life, and the replacements continued to keep slipping to the right, the F-35.