Palmer Luckey

It was government giving private companies the wrong incentives and then bureaucrats not being willing to do things that are outside of that existing set of incentives because they're worried it's gonna be bad for their career.

Why would you take a bet on a small company?

If you bet on Boeing and then they spend hundreds of billions of dollars and fail, that's how it goes.

Sometimes you fail.

If you bet a thousandth of that

on a small company that has never delivered a product but has a very promising path to making something that is much better and then that fails, everyone's gonna say, wow, that was a really stupid bet.

Why did you ever even think about doing that?

Of course that was never going to work.

They have no proof of performance.

This is a problem that is self-reinforcing.

The United States used to be very good taking small companies that were building powerful things

and turning them into large companies that could do those good things at scale.

But since the end of the Cold War, we've lost that muscle.

There's been massive consolidation in the defense industry.

80% of the money goes to just five companies.

30% of major weapons systems contracts have literally one bidder, meaning no competition even on the private side.

How can you have good outcomes in a world like that?

Offensive and defensive is definitely the right scale.

Distributed or not distributed, I'm not sure.

That I actually think matters less by weapon system and more by the power dynamic of the nation.