Launching our Defense Podcast! Silicon Shield is Fake, Drones + Future of War

If the All-In pod did defense tech and was good

Over on the podcast feed we’re four episodes into a new series discussing American defense and the future of war, Second Breakfast. We had to go with something Lord of the Rings-themed and still can’t believe Palantir’s

First Breakfast

left this lane open for us. Recurring cohosts include

Justin Mc

,

Tony Stark

and Eric Robinson.

Below I’m featuring a transcript from our second show. We got into:

• Drones in Ukraine, Lebanon, and Iran and the new reality of remote warfare

• Why everyone including John Bolton walks around with TS printouts

• Why the ‘Silicon Shield’ is such an inane concept

Listen now on iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or your favorite podcast app for this episode, or scroll back over the past few weeks on the ChinaTalk feed for other episodes we’ve recently published on the future of intelligence, why China hawks are on life support, and what warrior culture has done to the Army.

Drone Bolt From The Blue Attacks

Jordan Schneider: Eric, I hear you have some feelings about the idea of an Israel-style “bolt from the blue“ drone strike on Iran happening in the US.

Eric Robinson: There are a couple of extraordinary case studies that aren’t rattling people the way they should be. The experience of Russian strategic air being on the receiving end of covertly placed Ukrainian airstrikes hasn’t been fully assessed. Nor have the US partners, allies, or people in industry thought about the implications of the Israeli Defense Force or Mossad employing covertly placed air assets against the Iranian integrated defense system.

We’re witnessing unmanned aerial systems being employed in ways that knock out strategic capabilities. Yet I haven’t seen an equivalent conversation about defending the US, our partners and allies, or critical infrastructure — shipyards, any of that — from these kinds of threats. This is opposed to Golden Dome, which is a massive spending program against a narrow-banded but obviously important threat.

Assuming Golden Dome is technologically feasible — and we know that ballistic missile intercepts are, as we’ve seen with some regularity in the Middle East — ballistic missile threats from ICBMs or MRBMs are acts of substantial war, and the US needs to be secured against that. But where is the paired effort to guard against UAS strikes moving against a natural gas facility or an airline terminal? It’s not there yet.

Jordan Schneider: Or even your Golden Dome missile battery? We can put these two together, right?

Eric Robinson: Thanks for giving me the floor. If you want to be unnerved about something, it’s that counter-UAS efforts are being treated as a tactical tool. But where’s the coastal artillery? Where is the effort to think through how a determined opponent of the US would actually get at the heart of American industrial capacity?

Missiles over Tel Aviv. Source.

Whether it’s your Saronic building in Franklin, Louisiana, or your Anduril building in Ohio, you’ve got gate guards. But are people trying to surreptitiously enter your facility or go after you with a cyber profile? The only threat you haven’t considered in the modern world — and the Israelis and Ukrainians have demonstrated it — is this one.

Justin McIntosh: In a lot of ways, Jordan, this goes back to what you talked about last week or two weeks ago when we discussed critical minerals. We’ve been writing about this for 15 years — that we have this critical mineral dependency on China. We haven’t done anything about it.

The Obama administration struck Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen. The USS Cole was hit by a suicide boat, which was a precursor to an unmanned suicide boat, for lack of a better term. We already saw then that there was potential for operations in countries where we haven’t declared war and don’t have a huge presence, based on intelligence gathering. How long will it take for other people to do the same thing inside the borders of the US?

To be honest, we ignored it because there was always this assumption that we were different. We had our two oceans, and we were surrounded by two oceans and weak neighbors, so we were good. Some people are finally acknowledging that those things don’t exist anymore.

Where are we on national defense? Where are we on moving off reliance on GPS, which was directed in 2000? There was an executive order that directed the US to move off reliance on GPS for assured timing. We saw zero movement on that, in part because it was an Executive Order that came out of the Trump administration and was followed by a Democratic president who wasn’t going to reinforce anything Trump had done.

Now we’re at a different point, and that’s another critical vulnerability that exists that we haven’t addressed. We have a drone critical vulnerability. We have Salt Typhoon and all the other bolt typhoons still unaddressed. Every time we start bringing them up, they get mired in conversations about who is saying we have this vulnerability or who is saying this exists. But what are we going to do about it?

Tony Stark: Two major issues haven’t been addressed. One is the changing role cyber plays in warfare. Probably since at least the 1990s, but building up after the strike against the Iranians around 2010, there was this hype that cyber was going to dominate every facet of warfare.

It does, in the sense that food regulations dominate the food industry — you have to think about it, you have to plan for it — but it is not the predominant domain of warfare in the way that a lot of people thought. How do you continue to defend against that stuff while also admitting that this is not the only form of sabotage that exists and that cyber itself is a form of reconnaissance and sabotage?

Secondly, on physical sabotage: even before the strikes on Russian strategic air, there was a back-and-forth ongoing war of sabotage in the EU and the Russian mainland. Especially in the EU, it was onset — publicly reported, people saying, “Oh, this is terrible,” and then nothing came of it, at least on the public side.

That’s a difficult conversation to have in the US, particularly now, because how do you talk about sabotage in a way that is reasonable and not immediately thrown into a red scare? When I worked on the Hill, we would talk about the threats posed by the Chinese to the US, from Guam to the mainland. You would get other staffers saying, “So this means I have to ban them from the farmland.” You’re like, “I hate to tell you, but that’s not the actual major enabling issue for sabotage operations — whether a CCP company has a farm within 100 miles of a base.”

I honestly don’t think we’re going to have this conversation in the US in a meaningful way that is neither overreach nor left of boom, shall we say.

Eric Robinson: Thankfully, the FBI recently committed to dramatically expanding its presence in counterintelligence. Did I read that correctly?

Justin McIntosh: They exercised it against John Bolton today, apparently.

Jordan Schneider: If the Trump administration starts getting people for having classified files in their houses after he wiggled out of the whole Florida thing, more power to him. John Bolton had this coming, let’s be real.

Eric Robinson: I’m going to be a bit ageist, but if you’re in the service and you are still printing material, why? I don’t understand what kind of neurons get energized when you hit print on a TS/NOFORN document and walk around with it. It is extraordinarily strange. When I was an intelligence briefer around 2012, we had iPads. There’s no need for paper anymore. It is a relic — like those stacks of etched wood that reside in Britain and tell you what happened in the 800s.

Source.

Justin McIntosh: Bolton is a dinosaur. However old he is, he’s got his own way of doing stuff. But not only him. General officers who sit at the heads of the most technically advanced military on the planet print everything out, hand-write comments, and then throw them to their staff to get answered.

Eric Robinson: It is a cultural thing. You see films, specifically American films that portray Commonwealth officers from the First or Second World War, and they always had swagger sticks. Some of these people carry them because there’s a class issue — they came up from the horse cavalry and brought these devices around that gave them some sense of authority. Napoleon had his marshals’ batons. It is an element of warfare that is completely nonsensical, like wearing a breastplate.

We do have this imperial system inside American national security where if you’re a general officer or a past Senate-confirmed official, you have some GS-12 or 13 toady like I used be, to give you your news in the morning. Some people think that if it’s not printed on paper, it doesn’t exist. We create not just opportunities for people to break the law — which is arguably what we’re seeing around Ambassador Bolton — but we’re creating this extraordinary counterintelligence vulnerability when people who are just human have these sensitive pieces of material that they shouldn’t be walking around with or shouldn’t leave the building.

It happens. It doesn’t have to elevate to the point where it’s David Petraeus trading codeword material for sex. It can just be an accident. If you’re serious about counterintelligence, pull out every hard copy printer anywhere in the Pentagon, any place in the Intelligence Community, and tell people to deal with contemporary reality. It’s 2025. You don’t have to print this stuff.

Justin McIntosh: It would drive me nuts when I would power up my computer and have an email from generally an admiral, sometimes a general — because admirals, they walk out on the deck, throw something down into the pulpit, then turn around and walk back into their office, and eventually the thing gets done that they had demanded.

You would get a scanned-in version of what had been a typed document that was emailed to a person, where he had written in marginalia something that he wanted answered. It had gone through 14 levels of bureaucracy to get down to you so that you could answer this niche fact that he wanted.

Eric Robinson: To Matt Olson’s credit — former Associate Attorney General, head of National Counterterrorism Center, Über, WilmerHale — he was not an intel pro, he was a prosecutor, but he was ready to operate in a contemporary world.

Let’s talk CENTCOM for a minute because that is the heart and soul of American national security. When I was at the National Counterterrorism Center, we had a rare hard copy of the presidential finding that authorized the targeted killing of Anwar al-Awlaki. It was not on digital at all. It was in a dedicated safe because of its classification.

In certain cases, there are examples where that level of deliberation does have to be effectively firewalled, but it’s also in the environment where the CIA was deliberately obscuring its role in the torture program. Counterintelligence needs to be paired with effective oversight. Something in the back of my mind struck me as suspicious about effectively air-gapping a document that was just as vital in American legal history as Ex parte Quirin, when the US executed the German saboteurs in the Second World War.

Jordan Schneider: You heard it here first. I’m sure we’re going to get a story like that. I’m not saying torture, but something that was kept entirely off the books. We already have it — we already saw one manifestation of it with Signal-gate. We’ve got three and a half more years of this. We’re going to get more funny business for sure.

Eric Robinson: I’m absolutely fascinated to hear what happens when somebody like Steve Coll or one of these deeply resourced, deeply sourced journalists with ties in the Middle East starts getting regional services talking about the Iran war and the US pairing and conducting strikes against the Iranians. Once that whole story comes through, it will shake some assumptions.

I’m glad we’re talking about CENTCOM, because let’s capture the true spirit of American national security and the relative balance between INDOPACOM and CENTCOM. We can devote three seconds of the broadcast to SOUTHCOM if you want.

Justin McIntosh: That was it. We’re done now. SOUTHCOM complete.

There's a big development with SOUTHCOM and NORTHCOM — they're talking about moving the commands to Fort Liberty. The idea is that consolidating all of the forces on one base increases organizational efficiency — though it also makes it a bigger target for enemy attacks. Texas is making a push to keep it in San Antonio, or at least to ask why they're moving it or potentially moving it. We'll see how much that accomplishes. There's my SOUTHCOM take for the day.

But circling back to the discussion of sabotage, Zero Day Attack was released last week. You know, the Taiwanese miniseries that was focused on a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. At least in the opening bits or the opening episode, focus heavily on the saboteurs and the enemy within as an underlying narrative, and it’s seeded throughout the government. Interestingly, that was the initial take from that show — we’ve got to be worried about the enemy within.

The Silicon Shield Will Not Save Taiwan

Jordan Schneider: I want to talk about Silicon Shield.

Dean W. Ball

, who we get to pick on because he recently left the White House and decided to go on someone else’s podcast instead of mine for his initial White House exit interview, said something to the effect of on the podcast The Cognitive Revolution that on Taiwan, the US government is explicitly executing a Silicon Shield strategy, making their semiconductor industry so indispensable that it guarantees international interest in their security.

There are a few levels to this that are different gradations of reasonable. At an international level, getting the world to understand that a war over Taiwan or a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would have double-digit impacts on global GDP is a way to get Japan more bought in, get the Philippines more bought in, etc. Sure, I buy that.

But basing a strategy of deterrence on economic entanglement and economic costs is something that we have seen fail over the course of all of human history. We can go back to the Peloponnesian Wars when we had big trading partners with Megara and Corinth. That’s the thing that worries me. If gold-plated deterrence is a dope military and your enemy 100% convinced that you would be willing to use it to stop them from doing whatever they’re doing, I would put this as maybe level tier 4 or tier 5 on the types of things that you would want to bring to a conversation with an adversary to convince them not to start a war.

Tony Stark: Silicon Shield was always a “nobody move or I’ll shoot myself” sort of thing for those who’ve seen Blazing Saddles. There’s no good history of using economic interdependence to prevent war.

The other thing we did when I was on the Hill was we started to push Wall Street in the direction of understanding the cost to their investment in the event that there would be a war. Part of that was understanding the costs. It wasn’t just us — RAND did some studies and others too — of the cost of what would happen if TSMC went under, etc.

The unfortunate second and third-order side effect of that was people deciding to de-risk their investments, but not de-risk policy. The needle moved, but not in the direction that we wanted with Silicon Shield. Instead of “oh, if they’re going to do that, then we’re going to find other ways around it,” we’re not going to help change the status quo or improve deterrence.

Justin McIntosh: One of the big problems with the Silicon Shield, at least from the build-up to it — and we can talk about the messaging that’s currently going on however we want — but I was in Intel’s office in their foundry in Gordon Moore Park and I was being told by their executives that they could replace a substantial portion of the production at TSMC at their foundry within a timeline of months, not a timeline of years. This was under Pat Gelsinger, and Intel’s always been a humble company that’s never over-promised anything.

Again, you’re at that point where you have one of the larger companies within the US that was counter-arguing it doesn’t even matter — we can replace it. Now you fast-forward to “we’re going to build a Silicon Shield.” But even the messaging from the administration is “we’re going to give them our third or fourth-best generation of chips and get them addicted to those,” to which you then get the Chinese coming out and saying, “Hey, we’re going to limit — we want 70% of our chips to come out of Huawei and SMIC, not out of anything that NVIDIA or TSMC is producing.” Again, you talk about shooting yourself in the foot. Even our messaging on this one has been off.

Jordan Schneider: More on Silicon Shielding. It’s a weird thing because on one level, we think that having the whole world dependent on chips coming out of TSMC is going to make war less likely. But we are also trying to force TSMC to manufacture in the US. Apparently, we’re going to take a golden share out of Intel and wave some magic wands, bang some heads together to make sure that they are a functioning entity in the decade to come.

I guess this is reassuring in the sense that Silicon Shield maxing would mean letting Intel die. But having the whole world all dependent on TSMC to live in a modern society and having some resilience may lessen the effectiveness of the Silicon Shield. But is America going to go to war in defense of Taiwan or break a blockade on Taiwan because we’re worried about semiconductor exports? If China’s smart, they just let the chips out. And then I guess we don’t care.

Eric Robinson: But let’s take it away from Taiwan for a second. Let’s borrow from Frank Herbert and Dune. People speaking of Silicon Shield are almost talking about it like it’s Arrakis — the one place in the universe you can get the spice melange that makes everything function. Dune as a setting would not be compelling if “Oh well, actually any planet can create spice. They just have to create the CHIPS Act for spice.”

There’s a lot of magical thinking going on that Taiwan is excellent at a certain set of processes, but those processes are exportable, downloadable, and replicated. The world is not going to war for Taiwan. He who controls TSMC does not control the universe.

Justin McIntosh: Why not offer all TSMC employees of a certain rank American citizenship? You’re already building a TSMC fab. We say that the problem is the American work ethic. If you read some of the stories on getting the fabs up to production level. If anything happens, you’re an American citizen, you’ll escape quickly. I kind of agree with that.

Jordan Schneider: I also think that our energy, man, the new head of DHS, the new head of USCIS, are saying, we’re going to make sure everyone on an F-1 visa knows that they’re not welcome once they graduate. Mike Gallagher is out in the streets saying, “Don’t let Chinese students come to the US and study technology.”

Justin McIntosh: You get the techno-libertarianism meets the nationalism on this one — they’re going to constantly butt heads. You’ve already seen it get Elon out of the administration, among other things.

Tony Stark: When the CHIPS legislation came out, chip companies said, “No, no, no. We have to be able to keep our facilities in China. You can’t regulate what money we spend or how we spend it. Who knows where those chips are going? We certainly don’t keep track”.

To have that been said and then, “Oh, but don’t worry, we can absolutely duplicate production elsewhere extremely quickly, at low cost. The people don’t matter,” is insane. If TSMC went under tomorrow — by a bolt of lightning or several — you would need 10 years and probably half a trillion dollars to replicate it. Right now, you don’t need to replicate it all at once, and that’s a different mathematical problem. But the point is that you’re not just moving a campsite. There’s a lot to move — supply chains, everything.

If that’s what’s being sold to the US government now — “don’t worry about it, we can pick up and move quickly” — I am extremely concerned.

Jordan Schneider: Second breakfast is — we’re very intertextual here. The Mick Ryan interview, what were your guys’ takes on that?

Tony Stark: I mostly agreed with him. I found his analysis very compelling and nuanced, which is different from a lot of the analysis about Ukraine these days. When we talk about what the future of warfare is — pre-’22 and after ’22 — people tend towards almost the mini puzzle pieces that they see as they walk, and they tend towards these lines, it’s like walking a path in the woods, and that’s how you get paths in the woods.

That’s where a lot of future predictions come into play and have issues — they see these trend lines and they want to chase the trend lines. In the 2010s, we had drone warfare, but not the type of drone warfare that we see today. You see the precision-guided, no air defense sort of thing. Or even with Ukraine, you see this “oh, everything’s going to be attrition or everything is going to be these very small UAS systems because that’s what you can build quickly,” even though they don’t have range or are not generating the effects at mass we talked about in the last podcast.

This goes back to this document that goes around — I think it was a Pentagon memo — that said, “we’ve been wrong every time about what’s going to happen in the next 10 years of warfare.” Who is the “we” in that question? Because former Marine Corps Commandant General Berger said there’s always an analyst who knows. Is that analyst heard and can the system work around that analyst to generate supporting detail?

There were a couple of analysts who knew that Russian logistics were terrible, right, in 2022. For whatever Taiwan will be, those will be the correct ones. Is the problem that we collectively cannot predict the future, or that we collectively would prefer to focus on trend lines, to what we want to be true or what sounds like it should be true, as opposed to what is true? A lot of times, that means having difficult conversations that the senior leaders who sponsor these studies and analyses don’t want to hear.

Justin McIntosh: I’ve appreciated Mick Ryan’s nuance since he started doing his Twitter serial blog posts when the Ukraine invasion started. He’s thoughtful, and he thinks through the subject in an interesting way. But I wonder if he isn’t too fixated on the idea that it’s all incremental change and that incremental change, we’re going to see it and we’re going to be able to know that based on these building blocks we’re going to get to here.

That is a retrospective viewpoint. We look back and we see it. The truth is that there have been fundamental leaps that took everyone by surprise, in part because you get cavalry officers who are absolutely wedded to the horse or you get infantry officers that are absolutely wedded to “we have to be on the offensive and the strength of the offensive,” and they miss the implications of barbed wire and the machine gun or mechanization and things like that.

He referred to, “Well, you know, in Ukraine we haven’t seen a real air war.” Man, we keep seeing that. I don’t know what blowing up strategic bombers on a runway is if not an air war or denuding that air power.

Eric Robinson: Russian attack aviation was partially decisive in blunting the so-called counteroffensive in 2023. Saying there’s no air war means there’s no dogfights. And that’s not necessarily true.

Justin McIntosh: I hear that same argument when I talk to Air Force buddies that I know or people currently in the Air Force. They say, “Well, when we get in and we establish air superiority, it’ll be different than what we’re seeing and those drones won’t be able to do all their fancy little stuff.” Those are conversations between mid and senior-level officers who grew up flying fighters or grew up flying bombers and they believe the Curtis LeMay view that “we can win through air power alone.”

Those same people have a deciding vote when it comes to some of the directions that we take. To Tony’s point, it’s a little bit disheartening when you have those people because they tend to apply that same thought process where “nobody can predict the future, so we’re just going to keep doing what we’re doing.”

Robot Warfare? Eric’s Waymo ephiphany

Jordan Schneider: Eric got his 10th Waymo ride over the past week. How did it feel?

Eric Robinson: It has become a cliche, but sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. I’ve been around some high-tech institutions and was an early adopter of Uber and other platforms. But Waymo was shockingly crisp, convenient, inexpensive, and extraordinarily comfortable.

Jordan Schneider: How did that make you feel about the future of war, Eric?

Eric Robinson: There’s an Axios journalist, Colin Demarest, who runs their Future Defense newsletter. He often asks people, “When’s the first war going to be fought purely by robots?” It’s a gotcha question or icebreaker.

My disposition is that no war is ever going to be just robots. War is fundamentally a human endeavor.

War is an act of force to compel an enemy to do your will. But witnessing Waymo made me think that we are very close to battles and engagements being decided by autonomous systems. That will happen if it isn’t already underway in the Ukraine conflict.

Justin McIntosh: It’s almost a natural outgrowth. If you look at the Irish drone company that started to do coffee deliveries and things like that. Now we’ve seen in Ukraine a drone deliver a motorbike to a soldier so he could escape a firefight.

You’re starting to see autonomy on both delivery and autonomy on just movement. I would not be surprised if, in the next 10 years, you see something like the Mint 400 race out in the desert in Nevada — you see an autonomous vehicle be able to at least compete well in a race like that. Once you see that, logistics delivery over vast expanses starts to become a real possibility.

Eric Robinson: I think we’re extraordinarily close. There’s proof of concepts, and operating within the boundaries of Austin or San Francisco streetscapes is going to be comparable to warfare. In fact, probably the parameters are even tighter given baseline safety concerns.

Autonomous systems interacting with one another — from ISR to strike to sensor — is certainly going to be the future. Do I think that humans are going to be completely pulled out of the decision loop? I don’t think so. The poor bloody infantry is still going to be a fundamental component of human conflict.