Mike Baker

And I know that the Pentagon has done this talk about, you know, we want to go on to wartime footing.

So what is an efficient manufacturing and delivery time from your perspective, knowing all the various steps that are involved, what can they pare that down to?

That's an excellent question.

And of course, it's going to depend on the complexity of the weapon system, right?

So you might say something like, well, our new Lucas drone, which is essentially a cheaper copy of the Shahed drone, you might be able to manufacture that in six weeks just using commercial off-the-shelf components.

I think that commercial off-the-shelf components are the real...

Critical component to doing any kind of mass manufacturing during wartime.

I was just down at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina supporting an exercise where the Marines fired a Neuros Archer drone.

These are one way attack drones.

They're very, very simple.

Their warhead is modular.

You take a bunch of plastic, a bunch of C4, pack it into a cone and then screw on what kind of warhead you want.

It might be an anti-personnel warhead, which has a bunch of tungsten blocks inside the thing that can explode.

Or it might be a shape charge warhead, which is a copper disc that you kind of screw on.

And everything is off the shelf.

So you're using standard C4, which you already have on your ship if you're on a Mew, right?

A Marine Expeditionary Unit.

You're using a standard blasting cap, which is something you already have on the ship if you're on a Mew.

and these things are commercial off the shelf now they don't work well at night because they don't have the night vision camera but it keeps them cheaper keeps them around five thousand dollars a shot i don't see us ever getting to ukraine where they're doing drones at six hundred dollars a shot but their economy is a little bit different so commercial off-the-shelf parts

That is ideal when manufacturing anything because your supply chain is a lot shorter.