Drones and Droning on About #DefenseTech
The secret to the military is its people and its families, not wiz bang tech
“There is some sense in which the president is the mayor of the US, but the dictator of the world…” Peter Thiel to Piers Morgan.
That’s an interesting frame — the power to drone strike is powerful indeed — but it’s imprecise, Peter. Isn’t it interesting that Thiel is doing interviews with the British world?
Such an analysis gives away too much to the “Unitary Executive” and not enough to the role of the President as a champion of the American spirit. You can see Trump as he who summons dollars from abroad back to America. He did this trick rather well in his first term but the stewards of those dollars were strange real estate moguls and friends of his son. Maybe now those foreign backers can pick winners rather than losers? Let’s hope.
In his discussions with Trump venture capitalist Marc Andreessen said that all Trump wanted was for American companies was to win. Well what red-blooded American doesn’t want that?
That’s the promise of the $500B Qatari investment fund.
“We have to be more aggressively deploying and finding ways where we could actually achieve more returns than the perceived risk,” Mohammed Al-Sowaidi, the Qatar Investment Authority’s new chief executive said. “You review overall your allocation policies, you look into global trends and you make some calls on the future forecasts and you see how you optimise deployment.”
“You can see the US is spending time on . . . creating more efficient fiscal policies, regulation and regulatory environment. The market perceives that it will be accelerated under the Trump administration,” Sowaidi said.
In other words the world feels comfortable storing their dollars back in America. Well, welcome home greenbacks.
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How shall we think about the Army-Navy game? Bestial, brutal. We’re not fans of football here, which we regard as a cruel thing that needlessly harms young men to say nothing of it being rigged, rigged, rigged. Still, into every life a little frivolity must fall so #GoNavy and how things are rigged and why they are rigged is almost always more interesting than that they are rigged.
Mike Johnson is a Navy father. So is Tom Emmer, who I initially backed for speaker of the House after helping to oust Kevin McCarthy for grifting off of the U.S. Navy.
One of my attorneys is a Navy father. So is David Scalzo, a coinvestor of mine on Censys Tech and Clearview.AI. My parents rent out their property in Coronado exclusively to the Navy. My portfolio company Terradepth, which does submarine mapping, was started by two Navy SEALs.
You might even say that my NSA-backed portfolio is an extension of this work. After all, isn’t the NSA itself an outgrowth of Navy Intelligence? I intend to keep fighting to make sure that I get the equity I am owned in Umbra and will continue to invest in NSA-related projects. It’s both a duty and pleasure.
We’ve talked about the space dollar. America’s growing satellite constellation can effectively immobilize anything large on the surface of the Earth. That’s why there was a bit of ridiculousness with respect to the Palantir ad at the Army-Navy game.
Couldn’t the Chinese just zap us from space? Add to that the increasing reliance on small, inexpensive drones besting large expensive ones and we get a lot of the way there. We’re in a world where drones are going to matter more and more essential for surveillance and combat.
It’s easy to see a lot of this repositioning as pageant. Ah yes, the Turkish now have access to the Persian gulf by way of Syria. Huh, the Russians are denied entry into the Mediterranean save through Turkish control. Oh, doesn’t this strengthen America’s other allies in the Persian gulf — Oman and UAE? Isn’t that good for us? It feels as if it is.
As interest rates rise, manufacturing domestically grows and people begin to wonder why they imported so many things from abroad anyway. As European energy costs continue to rise isn’t it cheaper to buy locally?
Costumers start to wonder why there are Chinese drones flying in America cities and they even start to hallucinate Iranian motherships. No, I’m sorry but aliens aren’t visiting New Jersey (though honestly, how can they tell?)
No, I have not been absent in this fight to secure the American heavens.
I’ve privately lobbing congressmen like Robert Wittman to block foreign-made drones from operating in America with mixed success as with so many things in Washington D.C.
Still it seems as if Trevor Perrot’s ship has come in. It’s long overdue. It’s funny how having your congressman elevated to National Security Advisor can help with all of that. In Trevor’s case it’s richly deserved. I’ve spent the better part of the last decade studying the capabilities of America’s drone fleet only to find them lacking or not terribly American.
But American-made Censys Tech sure doesn’t disappoint and neither does Trevor Perrott who I am proud to call a friend in addition to a colleague.
Some years ago Trevor’s back was damaged when some Eastern European hit him. The more conspiratorial minded might wonder if it was a hit on him given Trevor’s work on next generation drone technology at Embry-Riddle. Here is a man who can’t walk all that well taking us to new heights and here is the soon to be blind as a bat backer of him only too lucky to be with him. It’s a real privilege to be working on something so important.
A recent Fox News showed off Censys Tech which one of the presenters called “one of the finest American drones operating today.” And Trevor Perrott is one of the finest entrepreneurs operating today.
You should be wondering, as I do, why it is that so little of Silicon Valley gives Trevor the time of day. Could it be that they don’t know excellence? Or they don’t know American ingenuity? Marc Andreessen says that nearly every drone is Chinese. So why’d he pass on Trevor? Fortunately the Office of Naval Intelligence took a few Ukrainians by Trevor’s property the other day to scope out all that he and his team had done. Yes, they are the best in class drone. Yes, the U.S. military should be buying them by the truckload.
Even Palantir’s bleak suicide drone video made clear that we don’t need a Navy above the surface of the ocean, thank you very much. Such a vision smacks of silliness, of a weakness of imagination. A way to think about Palantir’s play in the military is as a kind of shakedown where the NSA, which now controls Palantir, has a look see at all the wasteful defense projects in American defense tech.
It’s nice to see that the Palantir stock is on a tear but what shall they buy with their new largesse? I might have a few ideas.
Professor Bill Rood had me do a report about Chinese technology way back in 2011 and how it had denied large swaths of the South Pacific to the American Navy. Of course the Chinese would never directly engage with America on the high seas. They aren’t suicidal.
The real asset of the United States Navy has always been her people, not some wiz bang tech. Navy usually plays on the Jackson T. Stephens ‘47 field. Raised in rural poverty Jackson, along with his brother Witt, founded Stephens Inc., one of the more impressive investment banking firms in the country, right there in Little Rock. Very impressive stuff.
Jackson Stephen’s son Steve Stephens is a friend of mine. His boy Warren Stephens is up to be Trump’s ambassador to the Court of St. James. Rule Britannia? Hardly. The son of a man born into rural poverty but redeemed through hard work and the U.S. Navy is fixin’ to be our ambassador to the mother country. God Bless America, long may she reign.
My grandfather Dwight Lyman Johnson ‘37 earned the Navy Cross. You can actually see the engagement in which he was awarded in the film Task Force (1949), which is about how
He took his ship the USS Miller alongside the USS Franklin. Grandpa — or “The Admiral,” as even his kids called him, was a critic of football, especially as it damages the young. Confined to a wheelchair thanks to his genetics,.I think Grandpa would have liked Trevor who never let his crippling slow him down.
Smart folks put money behind Trevor. Smarter folks put money behind men like him.
Careful readers of this Substack know that I’ve been on this topic.
Censys Tech — America’s answer to DJI — is already flying around patrolling the skies in the service of our wondrous country. As a company they have but one defect — they are based in Florida. Nobody is perfect. I am seeing on fixing that because I am tired of pretending that Florida is in the Union. I have had a few great times in Miami but I never got so messed up that I forgot that’s part of the Caribbean or mistook it for America.
Fortunately its founder — Trevor Perrott — is from Carbondale, Illinois. He’s of the Perrott/Parrott gun family — a gun which sold so well both sides used it with abandon and murderous intent. This is, after all, how Americans like to come together — by gunning each other down.
It’s a tradition mostly though I’m happy to see it’s a tradition that Mr. Perrott has not continued. His drones are not armed. Every son gets a chance to put down the family sin. Each of us has a gift or two and mine is to take the baddies and put them on a better path — a path in the national interest.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has already given Censys authority to operate over people and moving vehicles without the need for visual observers. Trevor Perrott will visit me in the Imperial City this week. He will have dinner with me and Alex Tolstoy who is a descendant of the great writer and the son of the great (and late) Vladimir Tolstoy who taught for 29 years at the Naval Academy and was a sort of go between betwixt Nixon and Kruschev. When I say I can imagine a world in which the sons of Russians and Americans can sit down and have a cocktail while I whip them in chess…
I can also imagine Censys Tech flying over America’s essential mines and large contracts with KoBold Metals, securing a future of American energy independence while strengthening our allies. It’s not a crazy idea; it’s the future.
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A friend of mine who was in the military says that all this football brutality is essential but I oftentimes wonder if the rather punishing training we subject the young to isn’t itself an error in judgment.
Do we really win wars by traumatizing people and permanently harming their bodies? We need to have a deeper faith in people and do all that we can to make sure they are operating at their best. Another friend of mine in the reserves was unnecessarily harmed in a training incident. What a waste. Why did a satellite tech need to get roughed up? For esprit du corps? Miss me with that nonsense.
To be sure, we want to cultivate a society of Daniel Pennys doing all they can to protect the most vulnerable among us but isn’t it an indictment of New York City that Penny had to act in the first place?
Didn’t Jordan Neely deserve better from New York City? Shouldn’t Neely have been picked up, genetically sequenced, and reunited with whatever family he had?
It’s far better to deploy a bunch of technology and make the Pennys of the world unnecessary. To do that, we have also have to take seriously the lawless threats posed by both Luigi Mangione and Jordan Neely to law and order. I identify them as the Mob and Madness — both twin attacks on good taste and what we might have called civilization. Mobsters indulge themselves as Luigi did; madmen are a terror to others and to themselves.
We are learning about what I’ve called the Golden Arches Lie of the Noble McDonald’s worker who saw something and said something and maybe isn’t going to collect his money. We now know that Mangione’s mother talked to the FBI before he was arrested.
The real story is about genomic genealogy and facial recognition being used to stop an active criminal. The Carla Walker Act provides more funding for genomics and there’s a kind of dialectic between the privacy and security forces around facial recognition. I’m doing all I can to clean up Clearview.AI friends. More on that soon. We’re in settlement talks.
It’s easy to imagine a technological fix to the problems of the soul. We will always need the Daniel Pennys to step in and fill the gaps, to be sure, but we need government.
Many a mobster find themselves in the Navy and shipping worlds, pressed into service by Uncle Sam and circumstance. You might even argue that we had privateers and smugglers long before we had officers and gentlemen. I won’t disabuse you of that. You can think of these can do Americans showing up when the nation needs them.
Still, the Mob danger remains. We’ve talked a lot about that here and we’re never going to stop talking about it because it’s the story of our time.
The Pelosi family controlled the ports alongside Mangione’s family. Not everything that comes from abroad is good. The future I imagine is one of genomic sniffers sucking in the air and quickly drawing distinctions between friend and foe alike.
Think about that strange Chinese lab in Reedley, California and how it was designed as an attack on our food supply — as a way of driving up the costs of our food by introducing pestilence.
The movie Beautiful Mind (2001) has a wonderful quotation about World War II.
Mathematicians won the war. Mathematicians broke the Japanese codes... and built the A-bomb. Mathematicians... like you. The stated goal of the Soviets is global Communism. In medicine or economics, in technology or space, battle lines are being drawn. To triumph, we need results. Publishable, applicable results. Now who among you will be the next Morse? The next Einstein? Who among you will be the vanguard of democracy, freedom, and discovery? Today, we bequeath America's future into your able hands. Welcome to Princeton, gentlemen.
No, I don’t think that AI will win the next war — it’s a distraction and maybe a grift — but I am certain that biologists will be essential for many years to come.
The NSA is interested in AI… and DNA.
So it’s not surprising that Fort Meade has taken on renewed importance and with it, the governor who presides over it.
We might have gotten a sense of that this past weekend.
Track & Field over Football arguments:
1) Football injuries are very frequent & too often lifelong (knees, brains, etc.). Ordinary sub-acute injuries also distract from academic studies.
2) Cultural & psychological shift away from academic excellence. Football appears to increase bias for activities giving quick, frequent, intense bursts of adrenaline.
3) Favoring sports that can be practiced life-long is a better investment than those providing only short-lived participation.
4) Excessive drain on funds in poorer communities via onerous costs of facilities, gear, etc.
5) Obesity & associated health risks over lifetime appear to be increased (see studies on pro-players).