Transcription
They wanted me to talk about AI and the future of warfare. Um, I think, uh, I think it's important to look back to enable us to look forward. And like, let's start where we are right now and what's happened in the Ukraine-Russia War. It has massively accelerated warfare in a way that I think it's the greatest advancement, or it's the greatest swing in the pendulum, um, really. Genghis Khan put stups on horses. Now, if you go back that far, I think that was 1218 or so. He set off literally the Mongol Empire. When he was done, it went from the Pacific to Hungary, and he mauled and terrorized his way through millions and millions of people and millions and millions of square miles of terrain. What stups on horses did is it allowed, instead of walking into battle or riding and having to get off and fight uh, dismounted, it allowed people to stand up in the saddle, engage at a high rate of fire with a bow and arrow while riding forward and also riding backwards. And so now you could war, so accelerated. Instead of moving at 3 to 5 m an hour, now you could move at 20 and 30 m an hour. And the Mongol armies, of course, um, when he moved, 150,000 people, soldiers, each of them had three horses, so you could ride hard, switch them out, ride hard again. And so he was moving 100 plus miles a day, and he just outmaneuvered and wrecked his way through societies. That's what's happened now. You haven't seen the full effects yet, but I'm telling you that level of change and Black Swan event is possible.
Because what's happened in Ukraine when the Russian army uh rolled in in February of 2022, um, I say the only smart thing that Zelensky did the entire war is he opened up the armories of Ukraine to the citizens, and the citizens took up arms and defended their country. Whether it's an AR, a rocket-propelled grenade, an anti-tank missile, a sniper rifle, whatever that was, but the citizen innovation stopped them, and then it started; then the innovation really started. If you think about it, Ukraine was probably responsible for 40 to 50% of the science and weapon innovation of the Soviet Union, why? Because Ukraine was on that East-West rub point, and you had a lot of European influence in Ukraine. Aircraft engines, rockets, precision missiles, ballistic missiles all came from Ukraine. And so now you had desperate people trying to defend their area, and we're not going to wait into the politics of the Ukraine war. I'll get to that at the end with questions. So I'm going to talk for about a half an hour, and we'll do Q&A at the end. But these smart, innovative people said, we got to fight all these Russian tanks, um, uh, and and stop this massive onslaught, so they started taking hobbyist drones. And they first started with grenades, maybe the actual grenade of an RPG, the shape charge that you can drive into a tank and and clack it off. And now it's to this point where they take a 3D printer, print a canister about this size with a copper cone on the end. Why the copper cone? Because when you clack off the explosive, the explosive wave goes through it, turns that copper cone into a copper slug going about 8,000 ft per second, and it goes right through that tank armor, even into the back; it's called the bustle of a T72. So that little FPV drone, little racing drone, wearing the goggles, we can boost the range out to 15 km, so that each one of you in this room can carry six of them on your back. So imagine the democratization of precision strike that that enables, and it's cheap, right? You take a $500 to $800 drone, you lobotomize it, you put some different software in it, 3D print the canister, and also you have an extra shell that you fill with um, with steel shot, and now you have a very potent anti-tank, anti-personnel weapon which cost you all up probably three grand versus $150,000 for a Javelin missile from Raytheon with a $200,000 launcher. So that's the kind of pendulum swing you're seeing, and that's before you even apply AI.
The thing that the Russians are very good at is electronic warfare. Um, a lot of American stuff, Javelin missile, HIMARS, um, Copperhead missiles, um, which is a guided artillery shell, they work for a week or two, and the Russians figured out how to jam the navigation or the command link, and the stuff goes blind. And so the most leading-edge innovation at the bleeding edge of battle is really on the Ukraine front right now, and it's and it's literally the people operating out of their garages figuring out how to survive and innovate as compared to the hyper-bloated Pentagon, which is not really delivered a lot of innovation and certainly uh good value of late. And so even into that Russian um brick wall of electronic warfare, they've developed another thing called a uh, you've heard maybe of a of a TOW missile; it's an old American missile from the 80s, tube-launched, optically tracked, wire-guided; it's a little fiber optic that pays out of the back of it uh as it's as the missile's on its way. Now you can put that little canister of fiber optic on the drone and fly it in a zero radio, zero communication environment out to 10 km. Literally, if you had an open window, you could fly it deep inside this building um to uh to hunt. And so that's the kind of change in warfare that's accelerated and democratized precision strike. What you saw in Syria just a few weeks ago, that was not some spontaneous Jihadi uprising; that was actually organized and sponsored by Turkish intelligence and Turkish Special Operations, equipped with small, simple drones, and they smashed their way through a significant Soviet-era supplied, Russian-supplied military of the Syrian Arab Army uh, and they conquered it. So you're going to see that kind of change now, even worse if you apply, and and the AI is being applied already on the edge, meaning you can put the processing of imagery, teach the device to think, um, and that's also been done, and um I've had teams operating in Ukraine learning um trying to extract the right Lessons Learned for this on the ground and Maritime side. Um, if you saw the jet skis that um had significant damage in the in the western Black Sea, imagine taking a jet ski, putting a NAB system on it with a payload, and you send three against a a Russian vessel; one of them's going to get through. It's a significant value uh payback for the for the cost of doing those jet skis. And now literally that AI is put onto onto effectively water drones like that or air or aircraft or or small drones, meaning you can give it an opt, an image capture where you teach it to drive to a certain area and look to say that's a truck, that's a tank, that's a ship, and at that point the the the jet ski, whatever the device is, is on its way; it's thinking for itself, uh guiding itself in for the kill.
So what does this mean to Modern Warfare? It means our trillions of dollars of installed capacity of US stuff is in high danger of being obsolescent. Anything that can be located can be targeted by not tens but hundreds of devices, and you know quantity has a what it silence say, Quantity has a quality all its own. You throw enough low-cost missiles at it, it really becomes a problem, as you've seen uh in the Red Sea. You have the Houthis, uh an Iranian-sponsored Shia surrogate operating right along the coast on the Red Sea, one of the major shipping ways, and they've been shooting suicide drones, cruise missiles, even ballistic missiles at ships, dozens, hundreds of ships. The US Navy acknowledges that they have fired a billion dollars worth of US missiles at those incoming devices to try to shoot them down. That's a false number; it's more like four or five billion because the Navy accounts for what they bought it for back in 1995, not what they have to replace it for in 2025 or 2028 by the time the vendor would actually deliver. So you have a huge uh asymmetry. Iranians, through the Houthis, are shooting a $20,000 drone at our billion-dollar warship, and the Navy is shooting that $20,000 drone down with not one but two $1 million Standard Missiles. And so it really speaks to the value of uh of some new leadership at the Pentagon because we are really on uh on the wrong path in terms of procurement and mentality and discipline. Uh, a tragedy happened even a couple weeks ago where the Navy shot down one of its own airplanes. Did you hear about that? Well, not only did they shoot one down, they, having shot the first one down, they fired missiles at the second guy. He saw the missiles launch; I saw the message traffic from him, and he got on the afterburner and and got away, and the missile ran out of juice um uh and and hit the hit the water underneath them again. And those aircraft were not far off, flying some patrol; they were literally in the traffic pattern, both of them on final approach to land on the carrier, and the Navy still shot down their own stuff. So the the um the misalignment of the Pentagon and the um the the the adrift of discipline, uh recruiting the diversity, equity, inclusion stuff is really distracted from the Navy or the military focusing on lethality and merit. And I'm optimistic that uh Secretary Heth is going to push hard to put them back on track. I did not apply for a DOD job, um, but there are 42 some boards that oversee the Pentagon, and uh I did volunteer to take on all 42 of those boards and help them restaff and refocus on lethality and [Music] Merit.
So what does this future of warfare look like? Um, you know, as you as you look at even what's happening in Ukraine, first, first of all, don't listen to the idiot politicians that say, yeah, we've degraded the Russian army. No, we have chewed up a lot of material; the Ukrainians have killed a lot of people unnecessarily; it's a really dumb war. Um, the Russian army has gotten infinitely smarter. If you shot at a Russian with artillery uh in March or April of 2022, it would take him an hour and a half to shoot back accurately; now about 2 minutes, which means if you shoot at them, you better be in your vehicle and haul an ass because they're going to get you otherwise. So it is and and really and I think this speaks to um old weapons, new weapons, the tactics uh or sorry, the tools may change, but a lot of the tactics remain the same because, you know, if you've heard of the Maxim machine gun, which was literally Hiram Maxim, really the first widely fielded machine gun in the colonial wars of the late 19th century to World War II to what the even um used by the by the Germans for a while, uh there the Ukrainians had tens of thousands of those left over in inventory from the old pre-Soviet Russian army, and they've wheeled all those out because they've been buying 8 mm ammunition for those machine guns, why? Cuz they're making quad mounts of Maxim machine guns to shoot down incoming drones. Again, old made new, um, and it's not just uh in the Ukraine theater where the drones have been a problem. The IDF in Israel has had a hell of a problem with the small, cheap drones. Literally 50% of the small, low-cost drones launched by Hezbollah coming across were getting in and hitting their targets um in Israel uh at tactical level or even at strategic level. Look, the Israelis have done a magnificent job with Iron Dome and the high-altitude defense, but the super low, like 10 meter, 20 meter off the ground uh drones were really causing mayhem. And again, coming back to innovation and uh and adapting to those realities, uh my friend uh is the uh kind of the leading demolition contractor for quarries in Israel, and he was just disgusted of seeing attack after attack after attack. And so what did he do? He drove to the Israeli Air Force Museum, and he dragged an old M61 Vulcan Cannon, okay, which is a six-barrel 20 mm cannon off of a tank that was sitting at the museum that hadn't been used in 40 years, and in in a month, lobotomized it, put a Tesla battery pack on the system with a new fire control system and a new uh infrared camera, and you know what? That thing is sitting on post just inside the Israel border up by Lebanon on the coast; I saw it, and he's shooting down drones every day. When they fire, innovation and discipline and focus still matters.
So China has an enormous industrial base, okay, 40 to 50 times the ship-building rate that we have, um, obviously in drones and components. A lot of those things that that that hollowed out the Midwest uh in in some I'd say some misguided trade efforts uh over the last 30 years have moved all that manufacturing to China; that is definitely accrued to their advantage. I think it's very important to to understand, um, you know, World War II, it's and I'm and in no way insulting any veterans service, but we lost while we were still messing around in North Africa in in Algeria in Tunisia 1943, that same February-March period, the Soviets erased 800,000 Germans from the German order of battle at the Battle of Stalingrad. They lost a million two of their own people doing it; we lost a total of 250,000 people in the in for the duration of the European theater of operations. What really helped America, what really helped the world, what the the Allies win World War II was American industry. If you haven't read the book *Freedom's Forge*, I highly encourage you to do it. A lot of you are from the Midwest; I'm from the Midwest, from an automotive manufacturing family background; makes me really proud to to to realize all those factories really cranked out and delivered that kind of capability; it made it possible for Marshal Zhukov of the Soviet Union to go all the way from Moscow to Berlin with 600,000 vehicles, trucks. Remember the German army that back then was only about half mechanized; we made it possible with tens of thousands of aircraft and hundreds of thousands of vehicles for the Soviets to win. So our industrial base now is nowhere near uh what it needs to be right now to be competitive, and and I think uh there's some some great efforts underway; there's a reindustrialize conference I participated in about six months ago; they're having another one. If you're in the manufacturing space, I think it's a great time to add plant capacity because there's going to be um uh I don't know, I feel a much different vibe and a lot of demand coming back from China. I've stayed in the manufacturing business ourselves uh with plants in uh in the US and in Mexico, and there's just a lot of volume coming back from Asia.
AI and and battle, as you see, um, well, now looking back, when you went from from spears, bows, swords to gunpowder in about 11 or 1200, and you start getting the um the matchlocks and the wheel-lock muskets, it literally affected society, why? Because now you had to field much bigger armies, um, and you start increasing the the sophistication of the weapon systems. And as small arms became artillery, became big complex artillery, became siege artillery, became then aircraft, then then then ironclad dreadnoughts, the sophistication, the cost, the size of the state grew unfortunately. And I think it's um, as we've seen, our government manages to spend unlimited amounts of money doing stupid things, especially when it tries to go to war, and we have politicians that completely lose lose any idea of what something should cost. And I guess maybe that's why uh Dr. Aron wanted me back here because I'm at least having come here as an Austrian economics major, really. In fact, I remember Dr. Dr. Ebling who was my professor, and the day I like right before I graduated, he said, "Mr. Prince, you've just come to a school that accepts no federal funding, and you're going to join the largest socialist organization in the world." I said, "Yes, sir, but it's the only thing that's provided; it's the only part of the military that's actually specified in the in in the Constitution: Congress shall raise a Navy," um, but but that convergence of trying to bring some kind of market solutions into a um uh truly a a a Congress and a military-industrial complex that's run wild, the amount of spending and waste that occurred in Iraq and Afghanistan, as you're seeing now with a Doge effort. God bless Elon Musk for cutting it down across the board; I hope we have the same opportunity to do something similar in the Pentagon. Yeah, cheer for Elon [Music]. I I have such respect for that guy. When he looks at spacecraft um and he said, "Look, we have to lower the cost of launch to get it to altitude by a thousandfold," and he's well on his way to doing that. And um, you know, as as I built a a private military contractor, I never really intended to be notorious. Um, I started Blackwater as a way um I had my time in the SEAL Teams was cut shorter than I wanted to cuz my wife got sick at 29, and my dad died all within a few months of each other. So I built Blackwater as a way to stay connected to the SEAL Teams that I liked; I loved that that job. Um, but as I'm laying it out, and I just looked at, you know, recruit, what does the military do? It recruits, vets, equips, trains, deploys, and supports people to do a difficult job in a difficult place. And we understood it kind of like the Toyota production system, how to manage our costs in a way that big government never was able to do. So, and of course, the politician's constant answer to us was, "You're doing something inherently governmental," and I countered that by saying, "You know, I I was born in the summer of 1969, Woodstock and Apollo 11, and if you said that 50 years later after Apollo 11 that the only way the US government gets to the International Space Station is on a Russian rocket or on a contractor rocket, they would have laughed you out of Johnson Space Center." But so Elon Musk has done a great thing in in piercing that that veil of government inevitability, that only government can do this. And uh and as we reach an an era of AI where that technical acceleration is really occurring on the leading the bleeding edge of battle in theaters like Ukraine, in um uh in Israel where you just saw it in Syria, and standby there will be four or five other significant changes in countries that occur this year, um that level of innovation and speed is only going to come from the private sector; it's not going to come from big government labs; it's not going to come from uh it's probably not even going to come from DARPA; it's going to come from smart people in America operating from their garages with a dream. And I really hope that uh that the Trump team is able to change procurement to allow for the purchase and innovation that the private sector can do, because otherwise, you know, as you just see the um I don't really fear as much as uh people get super hyperventilated about China with AI, China with this many missiles, all the rest; it still comes down to individual leadership in the field at the sergeant level, at the junior officer level; we have still the very, very finest of those kind of soldiers in the world. And I see I see units and people from all kinds of places as part of my professional life. Um, we don't have a monopoly in innovation, but we have a critical mass of it, and uh and a lot of that still resides in the military, and if we can and if if the innovation that the private sector can provide that I know it can provide, and as long as DOD opens the just a little bit, opens the tap of money, redirecting from the nonsense, hyper-overpriced programs that they like to spend money on, uh we can uh certainly not just catch up but surpass any capability that we have to worry about with China.
I think China, if you look at China itself over the last what two millennia, it's been one of the largest GDPs on Earth, always. The the aberration of the Chinese Communist Party taking over in '49 with the Great Leap Forward, killing 50 million people, and then the the Cultural Revolution in the late 60s and 70s, killing many, many more and imprisoning and really jamming up their society; they have turned towards capitalism, but then now they're turning away from capitalism again with with Xi Jinping and the anti-corruption campaign. So they definitely have some issues, and I think it's a it's appropriate policy for the United States, as we did with the Soviet Union, encouraging people that want to breathe free in China to do so uh and to to be able to buck the uh the overarching overarching control uh because we really have a competition for governance at this point in the world because you either have a Western Republic like the United States with actual value of individual liberty, choice, free speech, private property, or something where you're completely subjugated to an all-powerful state and actual rule of the elites where you give up pretty much any of your rights to do anything in exchange for some hopeful promise of some kind of economic growth. And I certainly know which one of those I would choose. And uh but but just because our forefathers, we stand on the shoulders of giants, have been successful for the last I don't know, we're coming up on 250 years; it's an amazing time for a kind of a not a reset but a refocus. And uh I think Trump is off to a good start for the first couple weeks, and I hope that momentum builds uh as we go towards uh you know a year from this July. Think of that 250 years, and if we can uh get back to actually what made America great, which is our private sector, not government, um we will continue to uh to advance. So again, I'm not so worried about China militarily; I am worried if we blunder into to a dumb, unnecessary war in Taiwan. Um, the US Navy is not ready to fight tonight; they are they are um plagued by bad leadership, um a lot of uh misguided training policies, and uh we spent a lot of money, and there's not nearly the readiness that there should be. Um, you know, a year and a half ago, we lost the ship, the Bonhomme Richard; it started a fire, started while it was in dry dock or paid in repair in San Diego; it took the Navy and took the crew an hour and a half to get first water on that fire on a ship, okay, an active warship; the ship burned up at the dock because of incompetence of the crew uh and the and the responding fire services. That's the kind of nonsense that's a billion, billion and a half dollar write-off, uh and that's a big aircraft carrier; that's bigger than any aircraft carrier we used in World War II, for example. So if the Navy runs a traditional playbook, if the if the Chinese, the Chinese Communist Party, and why do they hate Taiwan so much? Because Taiwan is Han China culture but on freedom; there's only 24 million people there versus 1.3, 1.4 billion, but it is a super irritant because they can't take that comparison; they're free over there in Taiwan, not on the mainland. So the way that the PLA would do it is they do a big uh blockade; they'd surround it; they've been exercising that consistently with no push back from the US at all, not even any unconventional means to to deter them. Um, and if they do that, so what is the Navy going to do? They're going to respond with aircraft carriers, and like I said, you run a $122 billion aircraft carrier within range of thousands of precision missiles that the Chinese can fire; that's going to result in a very bad image of a US Navy aircraft carrier with 5,000 of our citizens on board smoking or worse, and that that that ties directly into the geopolitical consequences that we would face then because remember the British Empire, after they defeated Napoleon at Trafalgar 1804, ruled the waves for the next century, and then they got spanked at the Battle of Jutland during World War I just off the coast of Denmark, and that was the beginning of the end of the British Empire; they lost territory, they lost the pound as a dominant currency, and you would see an unwind in that competition of governance. Is it our system of Western capitalism, freedom, look, democracy in a republic is a mess; it's messy, it's imperfect, it's not it does not have the crispness of a dictatorship, of course, but I would take messy and innovation and bottoms-up uh approach to problem-solving versus top-down dictatorship any day. But we cannot let ourselves blunder into the stupid things uh like that because history shows uh that can be the beginning of the end. So you know what, with that, let me take questions, and um I can also give you a tour of the world on on problem areas that I think will flare up if anybody wants [Applause] [Music] [Applause]. Thank you, Mr. Prince. We now have time for a Q&A. If you have a question, please make your way to a microphone; student questions will be given preference. Who's up? Send it. Thank you so much, Dr. Prince, for your talk. Uh, my question, I'm also an Austrian economics, hold it close to your mouth. Thank you so much for your talk this evening, Doc. Um, I'm also an Austrian economics major here, so we can always use more of those. Uh, my question is about uh can you elaborate a little more on the economics of the privatization of the military industry? You mentioned Elon Musk's ability to bring down costs of space exploration; how do we do that in the military industry? Is it more of a policy change that we needed to see, or is it more of entrepreneurs' uh responsibility to make adjustments, and what would what would those be? Sure. Uh, the simple word for that is actual competition and really opening up the uh floodgates when it comes to producing missiles or whatever. You have such a narrow field of of vendors that you basically get a duopoly or a monopoly of provider, and so they just say, well, this is how much it costs. I remember the first State Department job for security that we did; they wanted us to train the protective detail of Colombia; they have issues, and Greece right before the Olympics, it was like 2004 or 6, and we trained tens of thousands of people; we knew what we were doing; we put the bid together, and the State Department said, "We cannot accept your bid." They said, "Why?" They said, "Because it's so low, it's not deemed credible." Like, well, we had a 35% margin on it, so we doubled it, and they accepted it. That's the level of insanity, and competition solves that. Contract exclusivity; that's the problem. Like, once once a private company takes it over, they can't. So under the Clintons, we went from about a hundred uh major defense contractors and really consolidated down to five super majors: Lockheed, Northrop, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics. They need to be broken up, and and to restore a lot of competition and and actually or even just blow by them and look to the next generation uh private innovative ones and get them the manufacturing capability to do it; that's how you actually bring down significant costs. Thank you very much for speaking. Now uh the United States military is currently suffering from an ongoing recruitment crisis, not because America has any shortage of brave young men willing to fight, but because we know that the military under the current guidance of desk jockeys has been reduced to little more than a benefits program and adult daycare but with camouflage on top, now uh which has also been, you know, losing wars consistently for uh quite some time. Now uh I've been told recently from a reliable source that the United States is quite behind in a significant drone race, and while we all have great faith in President Trump and Heg Seth and bringing honor and efficiency back to our Armed Forces, we especially at Hillsdale College fear that the government, even a well-intentioned and well-led government, may not be up to the task of adjusting to 21st-century warfare without the help of the private sector. Would you consider founding a private military academy for those of us who believe that uh the safety of our nation would be better achieved by teaching young men close-quarters combat and drone tactics rather than white fedel, white fragility, and the poetry of Maya Angelou? Well, thank you for that long question-statement. Um, I um look, look, I uh I loved Blackwater and the team, and I had the great honor of employing tens of thousands of the best of Americans, and uh still to this day I run into airports and some garden spots around the world, and I I miss that. And yes, I will tell you I'm working on a couple of significant projects overseas which would provide interesting employment for young men and women sometimes, but uh yes, um I think, and that's one of the reasons I did not apply actively for a government job is because I think there's a lot of ways the private sector, because I look, I think the the business of America should be business, and when we lead with the military into all these countries that have melted down and need stability operations, we clearly fail at that. Uh, and when you think back to how is America founded? It was founded by three companies: Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, and Jamestown colonies; those companies were actually listed on the City of London Exchange, okay, effectively a stock exchange; they hired people like my SSH and John Smith, former professional military officers that came and protected the colony and built it up. And so and I've said with some controversy about bringing back colonialism, to be clear on that, there are millions of people that invade America every every year; why? They're coming for the American dream; they're coming for American governance. And I think there's lots of ways we can use market forces to ex to to literally do private cities, private governance of on on leased land in in melted or desolate lands around the world to provide security, good governance, the basic utilities, and the local people will flourish. And that's a way we can replicate, cuz you know what? I would take 10,000 mayors from around American cities; they'll run 10,000 cities in Africa better than they are. And and so replicating the things we take for granted here, property rights, getting a bank account, title for land, um all the things, if you've not read *The Mystery of Capital* and *The Other Path* by Hernando de Soto, please do so; really lays out how the basics of why why American capitalism works, why you have capital formation that works here, and how to replicate that in other countries. So yes, I'm working on [Applause] that. Hey, thank you for being here; enjoyed your speech. Um, how do we fight communism abroad when so many Americans here are in love with the idea? That's a really good question, um, because the it's it's such a a uh it's such an insidious, attractive lie, and it kind of based down; it's it's to me it kind of comes down to people thinking versus feeling, and the emotion of socialism, that everything will be great if only a few people are endowed with all this authority and power over us; it's this rule of the elites, which appeals to some elites, and uh it also appeals to a lot of people that don't want to take responsibility for themselves. So that's a it's an insidious lie. I um I was I guess uh inoculated from that in 1976 when uh my my uh my dad was invited to come to the Soviet Union in East Germany uh because they wanted to buy his machine tools, and he didn't like it; he didn't like the surveillance; he didn't like the whole F. So he dragged the rest of the family in a Chevy van across Eastern Europe; I spent my seventh birthday in East Berlin in 1976, and for a 7-year-old to see the guns and the dogs and the mine fields and the tank traps all facing in, keeping people in East Germany, pretty obvious to say something's not great about socialism if you need that level of of force to keep people here. So look, that's on you; it's on you to be uh salt and light amongst your peers, to say, let the let the data show, where does socialism work versus where does good governance work, and compare; obviously, Singapore versus um I don't know, you name the socialist hellhole; there's a lot of them. Thank you for your talk. I was wondering if you could comment on the use of AI in hacking and attacking uh computer networks in cybersec or in cyber warfare. Um, that would be a bit more out of my lane of expertise. Um, I remember when I took my first polygraph at the end, the polygraph guy said this thing about you hacking government computer systems; we don't think you're telling the truth, and I ripped off the stuff, and I said, "Listen, if your polygraph is telling you I'm hacking government computer systems, I can barely get my own email," so I'm going to punt on that one. Thank you for being here, Mr. Prince. I have two quick questions for you. Uh, one, uh I was listening to podcast *Caribbean Rhythms*, which you appeared on on on the way up here. *Caribbean Rhythms*; you appeared on that podcast uh several months ago, prior to the election, okay. Um, and I've done a lot of them, so I'm sorry if I forget the name. No, it's all right. Um, on there you described a moment when you met with President Trump prior to 2016, and you advised him to be, you know, on the lookout for who you appoint as an advisor, um, if I recall correctly, and I believe in you said in 2019 at a veterans event, he came up to you and he said, said that you were right to be on the lookout for, you know, who you are appointing, um, and I guess my question, the first question is, if he were here in this room today, who what kind of advice would you give him, given his resounding success so far in his first, you know, week or so as president, um to have him be on the watch out for, as as we know, after his first term, who your advisor is matters. And then my second question is, do you have like a show or podcast of your own that people can tune into and listen to? Yeah, so short answer is, my podcast is called *Off the Leash with Eric Prince*, so that's on um it's on X, and it's on um YouTube, whatever Google suppresses it, of course, on YouTube, but you can still find it. Um, look, I think President Trump has really taken seriously because he never really secured his he never really controlled his security apparatus in the first administration, but he definitely has made much better choices now, and um, you know, they've got a lot of work to do uh because there's there's just been a such a lack of seriousness. If you think about the reform, I mean, when George Marshall took over the US Army in September 1, 1939, like the same time that the Nazis invaded Poland, he started firing colonels and generals, preparing to fight the next war, and we never did any of that for 25 years, and all these generals, all these failed generals and colonels kept floating to the top, and they're now populating all these ranks, and you now have um we have we had in World War II we had 14 million people under arms; you now have 1.3 million, okay, so less than 10 times, and we have the same amount of flag officers in an era of, you know, instant video communication, and should be a flatter, faster organization; we have a very bloated top, top end, and hopefully that gets a lot lighter very soon. Hi, Mr. Prince. I was curious if you could go into more detail on what I would call the AI hunter-killer drone and how it can be programmed to look for and kill a single individual in a crowd. Yes, very true, very, very real threat. Um, there's a company called Clearview, for example, which scrapes billions of images off the web. So if you've ever posted any
Or two in the Army Special Forces, because they're now they're doing a drone course as part of every Special Forces qualification, as part of their curriculum, so they get it. And now they're doing a field-deployable kit where you have the rotors, the circuit boards, all the pieces in part, so you can actually make these guys put um, Frankenstein drones together in the field and uh, and go to work with them. So that level of iteration is coming. I don't know where that is in the Navy; I don't think it exists yet, and definitely not in the Air Force, because look, the Air Force, the Air Force hated the whole reason we have Predator drones.
Think of it this way: company called General Atomics licensed the original Predator A from a guy—was a gasoline engine, AB gas engine, engine—they licensed it first to the CIA. They used it in Bosnia; it worked. CIA, more of an early adopter, easier procurement. Air Force wanted nothing to do with it. The agency decided to make it armed; that's why you had some armed Predator drones. When 9/11 happened, General Atomics, private ownership, super free-market guys—Larry should probably hit him up—it's Lynon and Neil Blue—um, they um, they took all the money they made from Pred A and built Pred B, their own specs, they just like bigger, heavier, stronger, capable, and they made Pred C, again, until the agency started taking all the glory and space. The Air Force wanted nothing to do with it because the Air Force is an armed airline union; that's that. Look, they they be they've become that, and and the and the pilot Mafia does not want to give up seats, and that's the problem. You have to be willing to reinvent yourself or or obsolete yourself to stay relevant.
Hello, Mr. Prince, over here. Yep, got you. Uh, my name is Michael Rup; I'm a history sophomore here. My dad's a big fan of yours. Uh, I know you kind of covered this a little earlier, but what strategies would you recommend the US military adopt to combat those new low-cost drones if our old equipment is obsolete? Um, we have to have a better hard-kill scenario, a solution, whether that's air-bursting, uh, high rate of fire cannons, um, lasers, uh, EMPs. The reason I like hard-kill air-bursting munitions is because battlefields have a lot of fog. Well, we're in Michigan, for heaven's sakes; we know there's fog, rain, clouds; all that stuff is not great for lasers, but an air-bursting ammunition will fire and burst, and you have to find a way. You look, there's two things a military officer does: coordinate information, releases energy. Our information flow has become so voluminous that it's it's overwhelming, and and and they need to do a better job of sifting it, but energy-wise, right, releasing energy—drive the ship from here to there, fly that airplane, fire that weapon—the cost of US delivering energy, right, putting a warhead on a forehead is so outrageously expensive, or shooting down a drone, like the Navy trying to shoot down those hoochie missiles has gone bonkers, like a thousandfold higher than it should be. So finding simple, low-cost solutions—I mean, look, the Ukrainians have to had have had to adopt out of necessity—what are they using? 12-gauge with birdshot, use it, taking down small drones, and that's actually not a terrible option. So, so again, Hillsdale with a great shooting program, it works.
Hello, uh, thank you for coming to speak. I just wanted to ask you mentioned both that innovation comes from individual Americans uh, in their garage with a dream, and then you also talked about how there are uh, like five uh, companies within the defense industry who have kind of monopolized uh, the industry. Uh, how would you say that you should break up these uh, these companies, and how do you think it would affect the military-industrial complex itself? So just like um, the federal government, like uh, Teddy Roosevelt did some great antitrust enforcement, they broke up Standard Oil, or in the 80s they broke up AT&T, and the sum of the value of those component parts was actually higher than the value of the of of the monolith. So we're not talking we're not talking about trying to destroy shareholder value, but breaking up these companies so you instead of having five companies bid, we have 20 or 25 companies that are available to bid on certain on certain projects. Second, uh, from the purchasing side, if you if they can spend money on the little guys um, that are um, because the problem is the the the government government procurement people are bureaucrats, and they just want to do the safe and easy thing. And so if they keep spending money, and it's not their money, they don't care how much over how much to how much they overspend on XY or Z item they're buying, uh, so they just they just default to the the highest cost legacy system. And I guess the other thing that needs to happen is putting the decision-making of what gets purchased as close to the end-user that has to use it as possible, because it's one thing for bureaucrats sitting in an air-conditioned cubicle in the Pentagon to decide, but it's a different thing if it's a general uh, that is literally deploying with his personnel in the field to live with those decisions. I, it's always it's like the principle of subsidiarity: make the decision as close to possible uh, where people are affected by it.
Hello, Mr. Prince, um, this actually kind of goes along with what you were just talking about, um, do you think that with our current system the US is capable of adopting those cheaper systems that are being developed for anti-drone defense, um, or do you think that a uh, definitive change in the structure of the decision-making has to be made before those will be adopted? Um, I think uh, there's there's a lot of foreign customers that are desperately needing it, probably even more so than than we'll have a a more animated response, necessary response to obtain that difference versus uh, you know, Burr in Washington. But yeah, they can adopt when um, when Iraq was full-on and they had the rapid equipping Force programs, which was a kind of a way to completely end-run all the bureaucracy, there was a lot of tech that was adapted adopted into the field very quickly without drama. So I think you said something to the effect that um, as if you know where it is, it can be targeted and destroyed, um, so governments would and other apparatus would seem to be like they tend to be pretty stationary, would it would it become harder, at least in some context, to keep a state together, or um, is there some way to defend against things effectively, or I don't know, how is that going to affect the future of stability in regions or whatever?
There's another book called the um, it's either the sword or the shield of Achilles, and it's about the democratization of strike, and as tech proliferates, right, if you look at Google Maps today on your smartphone and you compare it to what the best imagery that was available in 1985, it would have been super-level top secret, right? Now it's available on every on everybody's phone. That proliferation of tech, whether it's communications, imagery, weaponry, now precision strike, uh, it changes the nation-state, and I'd say it imp it it impedes or impairs the nation-state's ability to have absolute control, and um, so then having consent of the Govern govern matters a lot, having a bottoms-up government like we have better. It also speaks to um, uh, us our ability to make life miserable for tyrants because of the ability for small units to punch way above their weight.
Standby, tyrannical governments. Thank you so much for your presentation. Uh, two-part question here. First of all, what do you think about the future of the BRICS Alliance under a new Trump Administration? And then second of all, you did mention um, potential flare-up points in the next year or two; I'd love to get your thoughts on that as well. Okay, um, BRICS is an attempt to move uh, um, things away from uh, a dollar-based trade, right? And look, the US has overused sanctions and and disincentivized people from trading in dollars. Um, the stronger the dollar becomes, the better our economy becomes, the less relevant the BRICS become. An America that is credible, credible in um, look, the foreign policy of the United States should be that our friends love us, our rivals respect us, and our enemies fear us. And current, you know, the previous administration, our friends were wondering why we were doing self-immolation, and our enemies were laughing at us, and they were constantly carving off another piece, and uh, you know, so foreign policy uh, credibility and deterrence matters, and uh, but there's a lot of uh, mess to be cleaned up. The um, it is in the interest of the United States, so for a hundred years it was it was a policy goal to keep German industry from combining with Russian resources, and now all this stupid war in Ukraine has done is push all those Russian resources into a submissive role with the Chinese Communist Party, and all that industry, and that is bad. Russia does not have to be our friend, maybe frenemy, but but they are far, we have far more in common with Russians than we do with Chinese, uh, Indians, or Southeast Asia culturally, long-term. Um, the real opportunity was missed at the end of the Cold War to really embrace Russia and uh, and not embarrass them because it was a great empire, and look, the fact is they are the ones that did the heavy lifting in defeating the Nazis, and and so you know, when you move all those NATO countries right up to Russia's border and they look out and say, huh, there's more unfriendly militaries on our border than at any time since May of 1941, it's an unnecessary provocation, and I would say bad statecraft.
So flare-up points, um, the Russians got chased out of Syria, so they pushed hard into Libya. They put a n they're trying to put a Navy base in Tobruk, and so you'll see Libya largely start to split because the the Turks have put a number of bases in Western Libya, and then you have Italy, which is the largest energy buyer for much of Europe's energy, leads gas coming out of Libya, and so that's going to be a problem. Uh, the Sahel continues to be a problem; there's a lot of terrorism there. They pushed all the French out, um, again, lack of credibility, lack of of the big French brother with Americans too, not finishing the jihadis that have been ravaging the place, and so Russian significant influence in Mali and Burkina Faso, uh, not as much Niger yet, we've got some things hoping to in Niger to make that right. Um, South Africa continues to unwind as a society, and the ANC government, the the one positive that development was that the Democratic Alliance, um, a better governance party from the south from around the the Western Cape area did better in the last election, but the ANC is true to its Marxist black nationalist roots and wrecking the country, and they just signed a a land ex ex um, land seizure bill, which is going to have really bad effects. Um, Taiwan, big problem. Um, Burma, big problem. Um, why does Burma matter? The Chinese built a port in Kyaukpyu, and they're trying to they built a pipeline which runs from Kyaukpyu right up the old China um, resupply road from from the 1940s from the World War II, uh, they built a gas line that way, and it helps make the China less vulnerable, and um, so watch on that one, and of course, uh, very close to my heart, Venezuela. Um, I've been paying attention to Venezuela and the nonsense that the Socialists have been doing there for a long time, and I tweeted after Maduro stole the el end of end of this last July, I mean, the opposition won the election clearly 70 to 30, I mean, they lo the bad guys lost by 40 points, and they completely ignored the results, and uh, I tweeted, if if Biden and Harris really want to support democracy in Venezuela, uh, they should up the bounty on Maduro because there was already a $15 million bounty on him for drug trafficking. I said, raise it to 100 million, sit back and watch the magic happen, and and uh, they don't even need to use US taxpayer money; they can use frozen money that they have from the from PDVSA, the national oil company. Um, we cannot let them get away with it because Venezuelan money, the it is a narco-state; there are 34 full-on meth-processing facilities in the country, uh, major trans-shipment spot and production spot for fentanyl, which last year headline number is 9,000, real numbers about 400,000 Americans, okay, as much as we lost in all of World War II every year from fentanyl, a lot of it coming out of Venezuela, and that socialist money is corrupting and tipping over a lot of other governments in in Colombia. Now you have Petro who is a communist, okay, he was literally part of M-19 communist um, movement, one of the students that took over their their Justice Ministry back in the 80s; it's a really bad guy, uh, at risk in um, in Peru and Chile, uh, there's there's an election uh, February 9 in Ecuador, um, we cannot let this the Socialist rot cascade across Latin America. So thank you, please join me in thanking Mr. Prince. [Music] [Applause] [Music]