Shyam Sankar
speaker
319 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 6 May
Shyam Sankar’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
You compare that to China. So in China, their primes, their equivalent of our big five, only 27% of their revenue comes from the PLA, the People's Liberation Army. The rest comes from commercial things they're selling. Unfortunately to us, so that cheap crap we're buying on Amazon is subsidizing potential lethality against future US service members.
So let me give you a cause for optimism. More than $120 billion of private capital has been deployed in the last three years in the service of national security, in the national interest. You know, the founders are back. Palmer Luckey is an archetypal example of this. You talk about a heretic, right? We have people who are hardheaded, who are doing this more...
with a horizon that is beyond just what's going to happen this quarter. They have a vision of what they're trying to create in the world. And there are hundreds of them. And the department is open to working with them. There's a whole sea change, particularly with this administration, of recognizing the need for this reformation. And so we're starting to embrace that.
I think we should, to the point of the ketchup bottle, it is coming out all at once right now. And it is the moment for us to seize the opportunity to fix ourselves.
Saronic and their unmanned, their USVs, the surface vessels. You have Epirus with anti-drone technology, counter-CUS, Shield AI.
Shield builds autonomy for fighter pilots. They flew the F-16 autonomously. They built the VBAT, which is a drone that so far seems like the primary US-made drone that is able to survive in the contested Russian EW environment in Ukraine. To the point of just getting out of our own way, how do the Ukrainians decide what drones to buy? Once a quarter, they have a field test.
They create a test range. They jam the crap out of the environment. Anyone who wants can show up, fly your stuff. If it doesn't fall out of the sky, we might buy it. And Shield showed up to one of these things, and they were the only one who didn't fall out of the sky.
No requirements document, no red tape. The facts, this is the equivalent of forward-deployed engineering. You go to where the problem is and it either works or it doesn't work. You taste the steak, you either like it or you don't.
I don't know, if you had to write a requirements document of what is required in a steak that you're going to like, it misses the essence of, I don't know, when I taste it, it either is great or it's not.
Yeah, I think it was a great bet by Joe very early on to take an entirely different approach to this gallium-based semiconductor material to generate walls of energy. that actually almost act like cyber effect. So unlike it's not one-to-one where you're firing a munition against a single drone, you're really putting a wall of energy.
So it doesn't matter if it's one drone or a thousand drones, it's going to have the efficacy of being able to stop them and block them.
Yeah, it's putting up an entire wall of energy. And that is, you know, it's a very clever approach to solve the problem. I think we're going to need defense in depth with an approach like this. When you think about the UAS problem, it is a massive offset that our adversaries have against us. You know, how many million dollar missiles can you shoot at $200 drones, even $2,000 drones?
You're going to lose that equation. And so we're going to need entirely different ways of thinking about this.
Now, this challenges, so there's a question of how quickly can the force adapt these things and recognizing that you're not going to have just one answer, that you're going to actually have to have a series of answers that mean that you're not afraid of putting your destroyers into a position to be relevant anymore. And that's the greatest threat.
So when I look at Ukraine, there are really three lessons I take away. And this is one of them. The Ukrainians, people often look and say, wow, isn't it amazing that they sunk half the Russian black sea fleet, even though they don't have a Navy? And I say, no, no, no, no. It's because they didn't have a Navy.
That's how they could conceive of an entirely different force structure that had sea dues, essentially, these cheap explosive munition drones that were guidable with a Starlink. It's an entirely different conception of the problem that I think a big surface Navy could get there eventually, but it's not gonna get there as quickly or as dynamically. That's one lesson.
The second one is we should have realized we had a five alarm fire when we went through 10 years of 155 production in 10 weeks. And I think in World War II, we used to make like 500,000 shells a month. And now we're struggling to make roughly one-tenth that, 65,000 or so. We've had some time. Ukraine didn't happen last week. We've had some time.
What lessons can we take about what it's going to take to actually ramp up the industrial base as a consequence? The lesson from that is that we got it wrong. We thought the stockpile was the deterrent. If we could go to our adversaries and say, look at how much stuff we have sitting on the stock they'd be scared. It's not. The deterrent is your ability to produce the stockpile.
Yeah. And so we should never have cut down to minimum rate production, all these ideas that were really born out of an economic fantasy that we could spend way less and still have as much security. Look, I think it's reasonable for a democracy to debate. Like, how much do we want to spend? but to believe you're not trading off security.
Like, we have to just account for all the trade-offs appropriately. And I think if we all understood, like, actually, we're going to change our spending profile, and it's going to mean that we're much less secure, we may have made different decisions along the way. So we shouldn't, you know, that is a hard-earned lesson that the production, not the stockpile, is a deterrent. We shouldn't forget it.
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