Trae (Trey) Stephens

We can shoot AIM-9s through windows of buildings and take out combatants inside of buildings without destroying the building or harming innocents that are outside of that room.

Everything is just about precision now.

And so my view from the annual perspective is if I'm building technology, if I'm participating in the development of next generation munitions, next generation weapons, we should be doing that in a way that is more edifying to the principles of just war theory.

Can we make things that are more discriminant, that are more proportional, that are more precise, so that we're putting the humans, the sacred nature of human life, that we're removing those people from dull, dirty, and dangerous jobs, and enabling us to engage in combat, engage in geopolitics, the real geopolitics, in a way that reduces the loss of innocent life.

Yeah, I mean, as a Christian, obviously, I think about this stuff a lot.

At the end of my life, I believe I'm going to be judged for my actions on earth.

And I don't want to be doing things that are acting in opposition to God's will.

And so I've spent a lot of time thinking about this.

I think, like, one of the misunderstandings that people outside of the industry have is they sort of believe that there are, like, this cadre of generals in the Pentagon that are sitting around, like, plotting how they can, like, enact violence on the world or something like that.

And, you know, you served.

You know, the reality is that no one wants to write letters home to the parents of children lost in combat.

Nobody wants to do that.

What we want to do is we want to deter combat.

And Reagan talked about this all the time, peace through strength, peace through strength, peace through strength.

That's what we want to do.

We want to make it so unthinkable

to do things that we believe are wrong that people just won't do them.

And that's ultimately the goal of defense tech.

It's not to make it more violent, more terrible.

The goal is to make it so lethal and so much of a disadvantage to our adversaries that they would just never even think to engage.