Joe Weisenthal: In this conflict. There has been an enormous, and I would say, a scary amount of missiles expended on the part of the United States, hundreds and hundreds on the part of Iran lashing out at basically all of their neighbors. And what was once an American idiosyncrasy, the pursuit of this missile defense capability is now very much a global phenomenon. The demand signals the supply and demand signal of long range standoff and the means to contend with it is very much a global phenomenon.

Tracy Alloway: Use the word scary to talk about the sort of volume of activity that the U.S. has or how much we fired already. What did you mean by that?

Tom Carrick: The scary part is, is the massive expenditure of these things. And I want to quote General Keane, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who said he was asked, do we have enough? And he said, we have enough for this conflict. That is not the same as saying that we have enough for the other tasks that we have around the world, most significantly, deterring a conflict with China. And what they're doing right now is presiding over an extraordinary vaporization of our inventory in a very short window of time.

Joe Weisenthal: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lives Podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal

Tracy Alloway: I'm Tracy Alloway Tracy. You know, I think we're roughly maybe a little bit less than two weeks into the war, and we are recording this March 12th, 2026. And there, of course, extraordinary number of questions about the timing and the duration of the war. We know already that the economic impact has been quite significant, particularly if you just look at commodity markets. But one of the questions that sort of may help determine timing or outcome, I guess, you know, we talked about this in the after the war in Ukraine started. Wars are about supply chains.

Joe Weisenthal: Yeah, in large sense. And quite obviously wars are about size and scale of the arsenals and how fast they can be replenished. Right.

Tracy Alloway: Two things. I know war is logistics. Yes. And also war is a racket. And the only reason I know that is because I just literally downloaded the book. So I'll know more about that in a second. But you're absolutely right. I do not like talking about war or conflict or military stuff in general, but I do enjoy talking about supply chains. And there's one crucial supply chain that we haven't really discussed in detail ever before, but it keeps coming up more and more in this conflict.

Joe Weisenthal: Yeah, that's right. So obviously, you know, you see these numbers and I don't know how real they are, but they're extraordinary. You know, there's like. Iran can launch an attack against a military base and a nearby country, etc.. So all this talk about the extraordinary efficacy of cheap drones and so forth, and then you hear about the extraordinary cost of missile defense. Right. So putting on our old international relations hat.

Tracy Alloway: Yeah. A lot of what we used to study was this idea of asymmetric warfare. Right. And the classic examples that would come up would be guerrilla warfare where, you know, you have a less well equipped army that is engaging in exhausting skirmishes against like a better equipped, larger army. And it's a way of like offsetting their own weaknesses against the strengths of another force. Nowadays, we don't really have that kind of ground conflict. Right. Knock on wood. But you're seeing it. Some people say play out in this arena of missiles, which is really where all this conflict is playing out is in the missile space. So you hear these stories about like Iran is launching these drones that cost, I think, $25,000 a pop. And people say some of them are putting mines in the Strait of Hormuz, which are also very cheap relative to some other tactics. And meanwhile, you hear things like, well, the U.S. missile defense system costs like millions of dollars per pop, literally per pop against a drone. And meanwhile, the U.S. is firing, you know, interceptor missiles or whatever that cost, again, millions and millions of dollars.

Joe Weisenthal: Yeah. And you hear and, you know, again, the math, the sort of missile math seems very lopsided. And then, of course, the question is just the pure numbers that you do have and what is the capacity to ramp up production, etc.. All huge questions that are where do missiles actually come from? Where are they made?

Tracy Alloway: That's right. There's a mommy missile and a daddy missile.

Joe Weisenthal: Well, I was about to make a Judy Blume joke just then, but I decided not to. But, you know, anyway, we have a ton of questions, and we don't have the answers, but we're going to learn a lot. We have the perfect guest, someone who knows about this intimately, someone who focuses on this entirely. We're going to be speaking with Tom Carrick, a senior fellow and director of the Missile Defense Project at Sea ISIS. And he is going to walk us through all of this and how to think about the supply chain of these armaments. So Tom, thank you so much for coming on.

Tom Carrick: Of course. Hey, great to be with you all. Thank you so much.

Joe Weisenthal: Why don't you tell us just to begin, what do you do? What is the focus of your work?

Tom Carrick: Yeah, well, look, since I the Center for Strategic and International Studies, I would say is the main defense think tank in Washington, D.C.. It's been around since, you know, I think the sixties in the Cold War. And within then since I asked or sort of the the department that focuses on hard power focus on Defense Department centric things and within that, I run the missile defense project. And so basically think mud space, have cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, space sensors, you know, everything in that in that window of offense and defense is what my team kind of studies writes about comments upon and host of stuff. A lot of events and commentary actually,

Tracy Alloway: before we even get into missiles. This is a question I wanted to ask, but why do we have defense think tanks anyway? Like, why do these exist? Because if you think about military conflict in the U.S., presumably there should just be one actor engaged in military conflict with other states at any one moment of time. And that's the actual U.S. government, the Department of Defense, Department of War. Why do we need private actors opining on military tactics, strategy, supply chains at all?

Tom Carrick: Yeah, that's a good question. That's a fair question. And I think I would answer it with what folks coming out of DOD always say, which is it's the world's largest bureaucracy. And quite literally, they don't have time to think. That is that is what senior officials say all the time. And when you go in, you also tend not to have new ideas. And so it's it's kind of an opportunity for idea generation. And this is not my formulation. This is what you frequently hear from people who go in and out of government that they need those ideas generation in a way to be contracted out by those people who have time. And so now, having said that, a lot of people who go into government come from the think tank world, come from the policy world as well. I think I would put it rather. And they go out, they think they write some things. They reflect on on things and study things, and then they kind of perhaps go back in to to to government.

Joe Weisenthal: Let's talk about from the outside perspective. You know, you try to estimate the size of the arsenal of various different weapons that the U.S. has. How transparent is the government about the size of stockpiles and how much is one job from the think tank world, from the outside, an exercise in triangulation, inference and so forth to be able to understand these things. And then just like besides the sort of. Approach you take to measuring these things? What are some of the numbers that we're talking about right now?

Tom Carrick: Yeah, so look, it's going to vary case to case, but I would say in many respects, although it's the government's job to keep a number of things secret so that the bad guys don't know exactly what we have or how many we have. Rather, I would nevertheless say that to a very large extent we are a democracy and a lot of detail is available in the budget books that go over to Congress every year on the budget request, the annual budget request comes out. And so there is a pretty good amount of tracking. If you want to understand what kind of Defense Department you have, look at the money. And so there's a there's a decent amount of information out there about, you might say, the garden variety missiles and the garden variety capabilities that have to be deliberated appropriated by Congress and then also built by industry. And so while exact numbers are kept sensitive, you can get pretty close in terms of these dollars and this number of rounds you can get you can get pretty close.

Joe Weisenthal: For those who haven't been following this as intensely as you have, can you paint a schematic of the kind of missiles where we're talking about when we talk about the situation in Iran right now? And what exactly are the different missile types being used for? I know guys love talking about missile names. Right. And being like armchair military strategist. So some people might know this already. But for the benefit of those of us who have, you know, we just see a missile and it's a missile, what are the different types that are currently being deployed?

Tom Carrick: Yeah, well, look, first of all, you know, what's a missile? There's basically there's platforms and there's projectiles, you know, aircraft, ground vehicles, ships and this sort of thing. But basically since the 1960s, there's been a high a high degree of emphasis on essentially guided missiles, precision guided munitions of various kinds, and also stand off capability. And so, you know, indirect fire cannons, guns, this kind of thing began to be replaced by much more over the horizon capabilities that could fly out of good ways, come back down, and especially in terms of terminal guidance, could then find a ship on the ocean or find using terrain mapping or what have you. So basically, since the kind of the precision guidance revolution in the seventies especially just made an enormous amount of progress. And so and frankly, this this tech technological progress is no longer that a monopoly of the United States, as it perhaps once was. It's ubiquitous. Even folks like Iran and North Korea and that kind of thing have it. And so that's that's the baseline. And so there's look, there's different kinds of missile reach in a missile. And a logically speaking, is simply that which is sent there's ballistic missiles that fly. Gravity's Rainbow, mostly unpowered for most of their flight cruise missiles that are essentially aerodynamic and use lift and drag to to travel some kind of jet engine or what have you. And then there's these new classes of things that are kind of blending. You know, people talk about hypersonic gliders that may start off with a ballistic push, but then have the maneuver, the speed of a ballistic missile. But the maneuverability of of a cruise missile or aircraft, you might say. And so it's a it's a rich and diverse spectrum that has emerged over the years. And and as a former Biden administration official said and I like to repeat, missiles truly have become weapons of choice. It's the thing for which we reach early and often in a conflict, and largely because of the combination of that precision guidance and that standoff capability. And so when the first Trump administration wanted to go hit Syria, you know, they sent 59 Tomahawks. That's a cruise missile to go to go get them.

Tom Carrick: And in this conflict, there has been an enormous and I would say a scary amount of missiles expended on the part of the United States, hundreds and hundreds on the part of Iran lashing out at basically all of their neighbors with a combination of ballistics. And a lot of these drones are essentially cruise missiles. When you're over $1,000 a range, you know, it's essentially a cruise missile beachhead, for instance. And then you have the the missile defense world. And, you know, it wasn't that long ago when in polite society it was it was conventional wisdom that it was impossible to hit a bullet with a bullet. Over the past, especially five years, that has been completely and utterly refuted and in conflict after conflict in Ukraine, in the Red Sea operations in the defense of Israel, a couple of times now, we've seen an extraordinary degree of missiles being defeated by a combination of effects, not just missile on missile, but combination of effects. And now, you know, we're kind of surprised. When we miss some of these things and what was once an American idiosyncrasy, the pursuit of this missile defense capability is now very much a global phenomenon. After the Ukraine conflict, especially in Europe, the European sky showed initiative Germany buying an Israeli Aerial three system for ballistic missile defense. It has been a sea change. The demand signals the supply and demand signal of long range standoff and the means to contend with it is very much a global phenomenon. I'll say that the top two priorities for aid for Ukraine over the past four years were what, long range fires, missiles and arrow missile defense. They went so far as to put the Patriot launcher on their currency because it basically kept them kept them sovereign. And these are the top two.

Joe Weisenthal: Yeah, it's one. I've got one in my office. It's the currency, not the missile.

Tracy Alloway: Right. I'm still trying to buy a patriot, but they won't forget the bond market.

Tom Carrick: That was already extremely helpful. But just to go back, use the word scary to talk about the sort of volume of activity that the U.S. has or how much we fired already. What did you mean by that? Unpack that statement a little bit, you know.

Tom Carrick: So let me just say that missile defense will not win a war for you, but its absence will lose one or could lose one pretty quickly. And so I said a moment ago that Ukraine, the missile defenses helped keep Ukraine sovereign. Right. If not for being able to thwart these incoming air and missile attacks, they would've been a very different situation like back from last summer in the hundreds of missiles, 650 projectiles from multiple parts of the Middle East coming at Israel all at once during the 12 day war. If those hundreds and hundreds of objects had arrived all at once, as they were intended to do in a place the size of New Jersey, it would have been catastrophic. Surprisingly enough, almost everything was defeated. And so it is. It is. Missile defense buys time to end the threat by other means. It does not end the threat itself. Now, what I said last summer after that conflict ended, the Trump administration basically threw the Iranians a lifeline and said, hey, we're going to stop. I said that's going to be a mistake, because what's going to happen is the Iranians are going to rebuild and then we're going to come and we're going to do this again in a year or so. And I was wrong because it didn't take a year. It's only nine months. And why that matters and why it's scary is because the it's not about. It's about capacity. Capacity of defensive interceptors buys time, but it takes a heck of a lot of time to produce that capacity. And so this gets to the specter of going up and coming out on this, the specter of going Winchester, of running out of defensive interceptors. And that would be a very bad day. And so when you talk to hundreds and hundreds of missiles are going to require hundreds of interceptors. That was last year, again this year. And so that's the scary part is is the massive expenditure of these things.

Tom Carrick: And I want to quote General Keane, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who said who's asked, do we have enough? And he said, we have enough for this conflict. That is not the same as saying that we have enough for the other tasks that we have around the world, most significantly, deterring a conflict with China. And so we have now cut in very substantially to our total inventory of missile defense interceptors. The numbers the complete numbers are not been released. We've done a study on this from what it was last year and it was a lot. And so why that matters right now, we're moving patriots and perhaps some fabulous missile defense systems from South Korea and Japan to the Middle East. That's significant because their job is to be in the Pacific and to deter to provide a defensive deterrent to Chinese adventurism or to North Korean adventurism or what have you. And so, you know, we've been saying different administrations have been saying pivot to the Pacific since the Obama administration. We're still kind of waiting for that to happen. We keep we keep lurching back to to Europe and to the Middle East. In fact, a lot of the administration officials in this Pentagon have been among those who said, hey, we've got to focus on China, we got to focus on that on the Pacific. And what they're doing right now is presiding over an extraordinary vaporization of our inventory in a very short window of time.

Tom Carrick: And so what I worry about you, you've heard of the Davidson window, the former head of Indo Paycom, who said, hey, he worries that China would be ready to move against some of their neighbors by 2027. What I worry about most is that this extraordinary expenditure of stuff is not going to be replaced in a year. Absolutely not. And that in fact this may be a self-fulfilling prophecy of encouraging of tempting China to do something very bad.

Joe Weisenthal: Joe I haven't heard the term going Winchester.

Tracy Alloway: I'm Winchester for years and years and years. You know, it's running out of ammunition.

Joe Weisenthal: Yeah. The only reason I know this is because my dad made me watch, like, an inordinate amount of military movies growing up. But anyway, I'm very curious about something you said, which is that you can't win a war with missiles and it's missile defense with, oh, I'm sorry, with missile defense, but with offense, presumably you can. Right. Which seems to be the strategy right now.

Tom Carrick: Well, and so let me speak to that. Yeah. The the joint force of the United States and working with Israel hit you know, I think it's up to 5000 targets within the first several days of the war. Well, they were doing so from afar. They were doing so from stand off. And so while they're not releasing the numbers of the Tomahawk missiles or the Jazz, some of the L ransoms and such, and not releasing those, one may easily surmise that a significant number of those targets were serviced by these long range things of which we have finite quantities. And so the offensive strike capabilities is also even more important as a deterrent. And we are chewing those up by at least the many hundreds, and it may, I suspect, turn out to be thousands. And that's that's also part of the scary part.

Tracy Alloway: Can you give a little bit more detail on, I guess, the procurement process for different types of missiles? Because I'm very curious about the thinking that goes behind, you know, someone saying that we want to have this many long range offensive missiles versus this many, you know, maybe shorter range defensive missiles. How do those decisions actually get made?

Tom Carrick: That's a good question. You know, fundamentally comes down to an idea, an idea of the order of battle of how a conflict may play out. And so, you know, this is the job of the military planners and the joint staff to kind of think that through. And I hypothesize this is how many how many missiles we would need to have in-theater, how many aircraft, how many ships, and this is how we might be able to marshal a force and conversely, how we think the other side might be able to marshal their marshal, their forces.

Tom Carrick: I will say that the Ukraine conflict especially. Made folks realize that our estimates of what we would likely need were dramatically too low. And so I'm trying to give one example, but I think you're going to see this. And in fact, there are news developments over the past year that gratify this in different ways, that in April of last year, the U.S. Army quadrupled its objective acquisition number of how many Patriot packs, three missiles it needed to buy over the over the next coming years, quadrupled that number from like 3000 and something to 13,000 and something. And I think kind of behind the scenes, you're seeing a recognition as we've seen the Ukrainians and the Russians use enormous numbers of projectiles or missiles of different kinds, kind of a sinking in that, oh, in an actual conflict, this would ramp up dramatically.

Tom Carrick: And so even before the 12 day war last summer between Israel in Iran and our being involved, even before that, the Pentagon began to do a few things, some really important things. The Biden administration had been ramping up, ramping up a number of missiles of offensive and defensive, of various stripe. You probably remember the discussion about attack or whether we could spare any attack arms to give to Ukraine. This administration didn't at first, and then they eventually did. That was true with a lot of munitions over the past four years. Flash forward to last spring. Incoming Deputy Secretary Steve Fineberg, who comes out of the private capital world, as your listeners, no doubt know, came in and began to call in the CEOs of a number of defense companies and I would say metaphorically grabbed them by the lapels and shook them to say we need to maximize production. You know, I respect his respect for hard power. And over the next six months, from a basically Memorial Day last year, the next six months, you began to see a lot of drills and a lot of figuring out just how many Tomahawks and all these offensive and defensive missiles and how much solid rocket motor production we could do on and on.

Tom Carrick: And so over the past two months, in January and February of this year, all that work was basically publicized. And at least in press releases, it said that Raytheon to ramp up five munitions. There's there's more to come, by the way. Lockheed announced that in fact, three Patriot that they were going to quadruple fired and go on the Patriot side from 600 a year to 2000 a year in production. And we're going to go from, by the way, from Tomahawk cruise missiles from 57 requested last year, which is a pittance to their goal is a thousand a year of Tomahawks. And what I would say is that those are all very sensible moves, very belated, by the way, that are. Properly allowing the lessons of the past couple of years to be applied.

Tom Carrick: Break. That was all before we went to war with Iraq. And so now the ramp called the munitions ramp hasn't yet begun. And the other kind of scary thing is it hasn't begun because the money wasn't there. And the appropriations bill that came out in January, I guess, became law in early February. Last month, the report language said, oh, by the way, we know we Congress, the appropriators know that this appropriation is 28.8 billion, with a B short of what the Pentagon requested just for munitions. And so there's a couple of things going on here. One, we already had that 28 billion and change shortfall for FY 26. And then and because of that, we can't put things on contract adequately to start the seven year, seven year process. That is a good plan. Very good plan. And on now, we have just gone and vaporized many billions of dollars and and hundreds and probably thousands of missiles over the past two weeks. And so you put that together and it's not a very good picture. And so at the very minimum, Congress is going to have to step up, I believe, for a national supplemental in the very near term.

Joe Weisenthal: Let's talk about the binding constraint to really ramping up production, because there's clearly the political constraint. And by political, I mean appropriations votes have to happen to say we are going to allocate these dollars to defense. Okay. We understand that part. There's politics, that it's difficult. Let's talk about the binding physical constraint. So when you say, okay, you want to go from 57 to 1000, what are we talking about in terms of the facilities that we have, The natural resources, I imagine rare earth metals and certain key commodities, maybe choke chokepoints or bottlenecks in this process. We all would love, I presume, to have an infinite number of missile defense, you know, missile defense capabilities, etc.. We would like to not have to choose between Korea and the Middle East or the Gulf allies and so forth. But what are the physical constraints as you see them to ramping up production?

Tom Carrick: Yeah, well, you mentioned their unlimited supply. If I'm not mistaken, there was a presidential tweet the other day saying we have a virtually unlimited supply. And I would just say that that is a statement that is problematic. That's really the reality. So so you just listed off facilities are long lead items for production. Are you all like supply chain issue? That's right. It's also people. There's also the workforce. You know, there's basically one facility in Tucson, Arizona, that cranks out Tomahawks, for instance. There's a small number of things. So actually, when you start looking at the the supply chain, it is in a surprising degree. And there's been a number of papers written on this, although there's a lot more to to ascertain is there's a lot of bottlenecks or there's a lot of sole source or some widget.

Tom Carrick: Mm hmm. And to the Pentagon's credit, over the past several years, there's been a lot of I would say not navel gazing is a bad term, but a lot of introspection, trying to figure out and understand to at least truly intellectually understand what is the supply chain. And there is still some opacity to that. But nevertheless, the primes, the defense prime companies and the department have been looking into this and I think has been illuminating in terms of the bottlenecks and sole source issues. And so you've seen, for instance, a a I would say a series of experiments trying to get private capital involved, the Office of Strategic Capital, when that was first being stood up, I asked the guy in charge of it, I said, I really want to know one thing. Are you going to be big enough to matter? You know, America's an asymmetric advantage, to use that phrase, America's asymmetric advantages. We're a wealthy country, but we have to leverage that private wealth. And I think there's a number of initiatives on that front that will direct and are helping to direct private capital to the supply chains for things that matter, to defense.

Tom Carrick: The other thing a couple of experiments going on here are investment in, for instance, solid new solid rocket motor producers. Everybody knows space accidents, space launch side of the things was also a lot of kind of new start up companies for solid rocket motors. I think this is good. I think this is necessary and if they are big enough to matter, then we should absolutely be doing all that. At the same time, there is the risk that we're kind of, like I say, fiddling with the bass and the treble knobs and not turning up the volume. And that essentially means there's two big companies that do SRM solid rocket motors, and one of them just got $1,000,000,000 equity stake investment by the Pentagon, that is L-3 Harris that has had aerojet. As a subsidiary. The other big one, of course, is is Northrop Grumman, which owns an asset that assumed over a decade in the past and so on. The solid rocket motor front, there's these experiments going on and these investments. The Biden administration put $216 million into Aerojet in candid Arkansas, which is actually one of the handful of places where we we kind of keep it away from polite society. You don't want big things blowing up near cities, which is one of the challenges of production as well.

Tom Carrick: A third type of experiment and this is coming out of Steve Feinberg in particular, is that in this plan, this initiative to get this munitions ramp, he's doing something very different, which is he's asking the primes to lean in on their own dime. And when I say lean on on their own dimes, I mean a lot of dimes because we're talking about double digit billions. He's basically asking the companies to pony up out of their internal funds, publicly traded companies again. Yeah. To to on spec begin to invest in these facilities. Now if you're a publicly traded company that's that's sticking your neck out and there has been the customer here. The duty is a monopsony in terms of buying things that blow up. The customer has not been very reliable over the years. And of all the things DOD buys, munitions has been a sine wave up and down, lots of very cyclical. And so that hurts the certainty of industry to be able to invest and hire and buy long blue items, etc. And that's why you need multiyear procurement. That's why you need a seven year window. And that's why this whole munitions plan makes sense if we can get it off the ground.

Joe Weisenthal: Joe, I was going to say we should sound the monopsony. KLAXON But I don't think we want any loud noises on a podcast about missiles.

Tom Carrick: TOM What about if we can't ramp up production really quickly? There are existing missiles out there, although to your point, there's a dwindling stockpile. But our missiles, like, I don't know, shoes or a jacket, can you just, like, tap your allies and say, well, we loaned your missile, can we have it back and use it now and then? If so, what does that actually mean for some of our allies who are still engaged in conflict like Ukraine?

Tracy Alloway: I see there's a there's a headline out there right now saying that in recent weeks, Ukraine's F-16 jets have been starved of U.S. made missiles. And now we have other allies like the Gulf states who need some of their missiles more than ever.

Tom Carrick: You raise a really good point. And I'll tell you, if I had a nickel for every time the Trump administration, 1.0 or 2.0 said to our allies, Hey, you need to spend more on defense. You need to be buying more America. And that was just an executive order a couple of weeks ago saying, you know, we shall use the sale of American weapons to our allies as an instrument of foreign policy. And we've always kind of done that basically since forever. But it was, you know, a little bit of chest beating and saying, hey, you, you, our friends need to buy more American made products. And there's good reason for that. America makes the best of the kind of exquisite crown jewels, capabilities for sneakers and things that hit bullets with bullets, to be sure. But there is also a problem. Look, there are 18 countries. There used to be 1918 countries that operate the Patriot missile defense system globally. And the Biden administration had to suspend the deliveries of Patriot missiles to basically everybody a couple of years back because they had to send more to Ukraine. Right. So in terms of our allies, it's actually that on the one hand, we're telling them buy more of American stuff. And then the second thing is, oh, we might not be able to fulfill your orders of the things you already bought. Like, that's the problem.

Tom Carrick: That's one of the big reasons why this ramp needs to happen is not merely for U.S., U.S. needs, but also to provide us the deliveries that we want our friends and allies to to be equipped with. And we want them to buy it not just because we have some some commercial interest. A lot of times U.S. taxpayer ends up footing the bill for some of these things. But because we want interoperability, we want Australia and Japan to be operating Tomahawk Aegis destroyers so that our Aegis destroyers and our Tomahawk weapons system, they can all work together and the whole be more than the more than the sum of its parts. So there has been a lot of leaning on the Europeans to send stuff to the Ukrainians. And look, it is their backyards or not makes sense for them to be ponying up on on for their security. You know, the Poles, Poland, the remembers the Soviet loot quite well. And they and a handful of other countries have been, especially at the tip of the forefront, to help the help to help the Ukrainians. So this is very much a global phenomenon. And there. Ah, to your point. A lot of. A lot of entangling relationships in terms of the deliveries of systems, the acquisition of systems. You know, Denmark, for instance, just decided they were going to buy a French safety air defense system rather than patriot up because patriot was better. And frankly, it wasn't because of the whole Greenland thing. It was because of schedule, because there's a long queue of partners that that want that stuff. And sometimes you need some sooner as opposed to the best in the very beginning.

Joe Weisenthal: We talked about the asymmetry of these very ostensibly, very cheap drones and very expensive missile defense. And you just think if they're really if the drones are as cheap as advertised, there could just be quite a lot of them and you can chew through that missile defense. How do you talk to us about that math? How real are these numbers that you see, like $20,000 drawn versus $4 million defense missile? Because that seems pretty brutal. But how do you see that equation?

Tom Carrick: I have to say that has to be the most repeated cliché that's put out there, the most repeated headline. You know, I think the Iranians shitheads are a little bit more than 20,000. Of course, there's lots of really super small, short range stuff, but when they're talking about going a couple thousand kilometers. I think the numbers quarter somewhere between 50 and 80,000. There are some poetic justice that we capture. Some of those shitheads in an American company reverse engineered them. They're called Lucas Lucas drones. And we sent some some of them back at Ukraine. And the quoted cost for that, I think, was I think was $30,000. So that's good. You need affordable mass. You need a tradable mass. And so that phenomenon, look, Ukraine is producing millions, millions per year of not many of them are very, very small, but millions of drones. I mean, darkening the sky, as it were. Most of them don't last very long. Most of them, they only fly once, for instance. And so that is certainly a phenomenon, a major a major trend.

Tom Carrick: But, you know, going back to the the cost per round, people like to count the cost of a missile because it's kind of easy to count. The things that are harder to count, that are frankly bigger is often the massive quantities of jet fuel that are used to drop much cheaper gravity bombs. And so I think it is actually rather misleading to just look at the the cost of the Patriot or the cost of the standard missile or what have you. You know, if you had to throw a thousand drones to have the same effect as one. 1200 kilometer range Tomahawk missile, you might not even be able to get there. Tomahawk missiles, our longest range missile and scout £500 warhead. These drones don't have that kind of warhead, so therefore they don't have the kind of effect. So there's it really comes down to what is it you're trying to do? And, oh, by the way, it's the platforms and it's the whole operational cost that matters, including, by the way, the cost of operational failure. You know, I like to say I've had plenty of I will say this on stage with me, it's useless over the years because I always ask this point, a ship captain, when he sees a cruise missile coming into his ship, is not going to pull out his slide rule or his pocket calculator and say, What's the cost of that Houthi drone and what is the cost of the missile? We're going to do that. No, they're going to protect the ship. They are going to go for mission success.

Tom Carrick: And so now you say, well, that's that's value versus cost. And that's that's true. But the cost, the real cost of the Iran operation is not going to be the munitions. It's going to be the enormous steaming of the USS Ford from Venezuela to the Middle East. It's going to be the people and all in the jet fuel and all of these other things. And by the way, the facility repair, those things are going to eclipse the the cost of the munitions. So, nevertheless, defense is hard. It is hard to to hit an incoming screaming re-entry vehicle from 100 kilometers away, for instance. And so defensive interceptors are going to be more expensive than offensive ones. That's just a fact. And that's, again, why missile defenses won't win a war. They can only buy you time to win that to end the threat by other means. And that's why you have all these all these other things as well. And I like to say you could throw a thousand cheap waves into the sky and it won't do the job of a single patriot interceptor because capability matters, too.

Tracy Alloway: So you mentioned ending the threat just then. And this is the other big question that I and I imagine a lot of other people have at the moment with with the ground conflict, you can kind of envision an end point where, you know, an army comes marching into a state capitol. And that's pretty much the end of the conflict with missile warfare. It seems like it can go on for a very long time. And I'm not quite sure what the defining point is at which two sides basically say, okay, we're done now someone's and someone's lost.

Tom Carrick: Yeah, well, that was the case in the 1980s between the between Iran and Iraq, for instance. Lots of lots of missiles going back and forth. So you've hit on a couple important points there. One, as is often observed, it's really hard to do everything with air power. It's hard to know if you have destroyed things on the ground without being there. And that's why I've said, you know, there there is at least going to be the need, whether that need is met or not. There's going to be the need to have some forces on the ground, could be special forces, could be partners from other countries. But there's going to be that felt need to figure out, did we hit that underground missile city, for instance, point to, you know, everybody myself on the spot for getting nervous when day by day would go on and the Iranians kept launching.

Tom Carrick: So the the good news is that the curve is flattening. There's a phrase from the code coders and a flatten the curve of of the rate of fire. And so you take a look at the the press conference, and that's a very good development. They go from hundreds a day to smaller numbers, and that has permitted above all excuse me, that has that reflects that we are somehow doing something. Hitting the launchers, hitting the missiles, hitting the command and control, or at least the commanders and perhaps decentralized commanders. That is that is a good sign. And add to that that we have now gotten this is the two most important words from one of the recent press releases from Chairman John McCain is he said the words munitions transition, which is to say we don't have to keep using a thousand kilometer range Tomahawks because the Iranians don't have air defenses anymore. We can use gravity bombs of which they are plentiful.

Tom Carrick: So I had flying back and forth and that's not cheap where you stop. But you can you can fly back your JDAMs, your small diameter bombs. And it was a press release, I think, over the weekend that we were transferring a bunch of munitions to Israel. And when you look at it and you look at what's in that list, it was grabbing bombs. And the reason that we've gotten there is we no longer have to do the standoff stuff. That's good. We can now do the stand in, you know, flying over top and dropping. But to your point, it's still hard to do all that from the air. And there is going to be that uncertainty, which is why, frankly, you're not going to have perfect military certainty from the air to. Really? And this. You're going to have to have, I would say, a political change.

Joe Weisenthal: Tom Kariko, thank you so much for coming on. Odd lot. I learned a lot from those. Really appreciate you taking your time.

Tom Carrick: Thanks all. Really enjoyed it.

Tracy Alloway: Thanks, Tom. Appreciate it.

Joe Weisenthal: You're Winchester with words,

Tracy Alloway: All right. I never heard that train going Winchester.

Joe Weisenthal: That's like that comes up, Winchester. You know, my dad's. He flew B-52 bombers in Vietnam, so I. Yeah. I have very mixed feelings about all of us.

Tracy Alloway: Defence procurement strikes me as an extremely difficult, I don't know, game theory equilibrium problem to get right. And yeah, you know, you have the monopsony buyer, the it's a monopsony buyer, but it's also political and the political winds are going to change. You have, you know, companies that are naturally profit seeking and profit maximizing and many of them and you alluded to this, we didn't talk about it that much. Or monopoly. SELLERS Right, Right. Like if there's one component, if there and we know all about how with advanced supply chains of complicated things, you might have millions or thousands of parts that go into it. And some of these parts may be produced by one company. Maybe there's like a shiny mirror or something somewhere. There's only produced by one optical factory somewhere in the United States. Then you have the buy American requirements, so then further narrows, supply chains, etc. So you have monopolies and monopsony facing off. And then, you know, how do you get sustained spending, sustained procurement through the ebbs and tides of a war? Extremely difficult challenge.

Tracy Alloway: It's it's such a weird ecosystem of players in military procurement. And the other thing is, like most of the time, what you're planning for is a hypothetical. Yeah, conflict, right? If an actual conflict emerges, then I guess you have some more certainty to a degree about what you need to actually fight it. But you know, if just a few years ago, if you're sat there and you're going like, should we be buying stuff for war with Iran, should we be buying stuff for China? Doing something with Taiwan like these are very different theaters of war. And I imagine that if you're a procurement officer, like the temptation must be to you always want to have the best, like the newest, shiniest stuff. And so I'm just fascinated by how people actually make those decisions in the face of both monetary limits and physical reality and political reality as well, which we kind of we glided past, but for obvious reasons.

Joe Weisenthal: Have you seen the photos? I mean, they're photos of us packing up sad missile defense systems from South Korea.

Tracy Alloway: I have not seen. Yeah, if you just search for it, it's kind of it feels very when you see the photos, you do not feel like, oh, we a major superpower. It's like, oh, here are these missiles. Sorry, we're taking we have to move them elsewhere because we don't have enough right now. It's pretty it's pretty shocking. But, you know, like, it's it's hard it's hard to argue against the fact that we seem to be spread very thin these days. The war in Iraq, the war in Ukraine continues to go on. Obviously, there's this new war in Iran. And then as you mention, you know, at least since the Obama administration, they've been talking about the pivot to Asia and so forth. And that keeps not happening. But there are obligations on the ground there. The whole thing seems to spread very thin.

Joe Weisenthal: War is logistics and a racket.

Tracy Alloway: Yeah. Shall we leave it there?

Joe Weisenthal: Let's leave it there.

Tracy Alloway: All right. This has been another episode of the All Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway and

Joe Weisenthal: I'm Joe Weisenthal. You can follow me at the stalwart. Follow our guest, Tom Carrico. He's at Tom Carrico. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Ahmed Dashiell Benet a Dashpot and Kel Brooks and Carl Brooks. And if you want more thoughts content, you should check out our daily newsletter. You can find that at Bloomberg.com forward slash Alberts and you can chat about all of these topics, including Defense 24 seven in our discord with fellow listeners, discord Gigi Slash outlaws. And if you enjoyed this conversation, then please leave a comment or like the video or better yet, subscribe. Thanks for watching.