Why Cheap, Expendable Drones—Not Billion-Dollar Platforms—Will Decide the Next Century of American Power

Good morning, afternoon, or evening, this is Paul Truesdell and this is the Paul Truesdell Podcast. There is an old truth out in the high country, one that every scout and every hunter and every man who ever read the weather off a ridgeline comes to learn. The wind always tells you what is coming before the storm arrives. You only have to be quiet enough to listen, and honest enough to believe what you hear, even when the sky straight overhead is still blue. I want to talk to you about a storm that is gathering. Not to frighten you, because fear is a poor compass and a worse general. I want to talk about it so that we are ready. Because the United States is in the middle of the largest retooling of its military since the Second World War, and most good people have not yet felt the wind shift. Let me begin where every serious conversation about American power has to begin. With the sea. And with a man most of you have never heard of. His name was Henry J. Kaiser. Today, if his name rings any bell at all, it rings because of a hospital. Kaiser Permanente. But before he ever built a clinic, Henry Kaiser built ships, and he built them the way Henry Ford built automobiles. On an assembly line. In 1942, with the fleet still smoking at Pearl Harbor and our real carriers years away from the water, Kaiser walked into the United States Navy and made a promise that sounded like a tall tale. He said he could turn out aircraft carriers, not in years, but in weeks. Small ones. Cheap ones. Built from prefabricated parts by welders, many of them women, most of them folks who had never built a ship in their lives. The admirals told him no. They wanted gold-plated ships, the big beautiful fleet carriers, and they thought his little flattops were a joke. So Kaiser did what Americans with a good idea and no patience for a closed door have always done. He went over their heads. He took his case straight to President Roosevelt, and Roosevelt ordered the admirals to give him a contract for fifty. They called those ships jeep carriers. Baby flattops. The sailors who crewed them had a darker name. Kaiser's coffins, they called them, because they were small and thin-skinned and the men figured they would burn. Combustible, vulnerable, and expendable, that was the joke. And then those expendable little ships sailed into history. Off the island of Samar, in the Battle of Leyte Gulf, a handful of Henry Kaiser's jeep carriers and their escorts ran headlong into one of the most powerful surface fleets Japan ever put to sea. Including the Yamato, the largest battleship ever built by any nation on earth. By every rule of war those Americans should have been wiped from the ocean. Instead, they turned and fought, and they held, and the great Japanese fleet broke off and ran. Cheap ships. Plain men. American production and American grit. That is the whole story of this country in a single afternoon of fire. I tell you that story because we are standing exactly where Henry Kaiser stood in 1942. We are looking at a fight we hope never comes, and we are discovering that the arsenal we built for the last century will not win the next one. Now, you have heard, no doubt, that the military budget has gone up. Way up. And you have heard a certain breed of commentator howl about it. These are the popular economists, the online sages, the men who have built a following by sounding very sophisticated about China and warfare and the economy, and who somehow manage to miss the most obvious thing standing right in front of them. And they miss it for a simple reason. They are not really analysts. Many of them are simply men who decided years ago that they hate this President, and everything they say has to be bent to fit that hatred. When your only tool is a grudge, every fact starts to look like a nail. So let me tell you what they are missing. That budget did not balloon to waste your money. It ballooned to retool the entire fighting force of the United States. We are getting ready for a war. I will say it plainly. That war, if it comes, will most likely be with China. And the whole purpose of spending this money now is to make certain that war never has to be fought at all. Here is what the retooling is about. For most of modern history, the platform was the prize. The tank. The battleship. The fighter jet with a man strapped inside it. We sent our finest young men into the cockpit and into the gun turret, and when the enemy got lucky, we buried them. We cannot fight that way anymore. We will not fight that way anymore. Look at what a small, stubborn country did to a much larger one in Ukraine. A nation with almost no navy drove a real navy back into its own harbors. Not with battleships. With drones. Cheap, attritable machines, the kind you can afford to lose by the thousands, that cost less than a used pickup truck and can sink a vessel that cost a billion dollars to build. That is the lesson the whole world just learned, and China learned it too. A multi-billion-dollar warship can be killed by a twenty-thousand-dollar machine. Xxx  That changes everything. So, think about how we used to fight, and how we are going to fight. In the Revolutionary War, men stood in a straight line out in the open, shoulder to shoulder, and took turns firing volleys into one another like targets at a county fair. We do not need that anymore. We do not need cannon fodder. What we need are the Green Mountain Boys. The men who knew the timber, who picked off the redcoats from the tree line, and then slipped away to live and fight another day. That is exactly what a drone is. That is what this entire revolution is about. The skill of the hunter in the woods, multiplied by the machine. Picture it the way the old Western stories would picture it. A wolf pack. There is the mother at the center, strong and patient, and around her move the young, fast and fearless, willing to take the wound so the pack survives. Now put that pack in the air, on the ground, under the sea, and out in space. A mothership at the center. A swarm around it. Machines willing to throw themselves at the enemy so that not one more American pilot has to. If you have seen the old space pictures, you have seen it already. The hero comes flying in, and all around him the smaller craft dart and weave and shield him with their lives. That is no longer a movie. That is a procurement plan. And this is where the Navy becomes more critical than ever, not less. Because the great weakness of the enemy is the same weakness it has always been. A fixed position. A base that sits on land cannot move. Its coordinates are written down somewhere, and once your enemy knows where you are, every missile he owns is already pointed at you. A land base is a sitting duck. But a fleet moves. An armada moves. An aircraft carrier is a piece of sovereign American soil that does not stay put long enough to be hit. That is why the big carriers still matter. And it is why we have to retool the whole fleet around them, into platforms that launch swarms, that command wolf packs from a hundred miles back, that put steel and software between the enemy and our sons. Now somebody always raises a hand at this point and says, but the enemy has satellites too. He can see your ships. And that is exactly right. That is precisely why we need a Space Force, and why establishing it was one of the wisest things this country has done in a generation. The idea is not new. The father of it was Ronald Reagan, who stood up in 1983 and told the world about a shield in the heavens, the program the press sneered at and called Star Wars. Reagan planted the seed. What we are watching now is a President who took that seed and grew it into a branch of the armed forces, the way Theodore Roosevelt took a tired old fleet and built it into a navy worthy of a great nation, first as Assistant Secretary of the Navy and then as the President who sent the Great White Fleet steaming clear around the world to show every other power on earth exactly who they were dealing with. Reagan was the founding father of the high frontier. This is the Teddy Roosevelt who took it to the next level. But understand, this is about far more than machines. This is about who we are. Some of these same commentators are wringing their hands about the immigration budget, about the money spent on enforcement, and they are telling you it will ruin business and starve the economy. They have it exactly backwards. This is not being done to hurt business. This is being done to save it. Here is the part they refuse to say out loud, so I will say it for them. Getting the violent criminals out is the easy part. The low-hanging fruit. The robbers, the killers, the men running drugs into our towns. Nobody serious argues those men should stay, and finding them is not the expensive part of the job. The expensive part, the part that costs real money and real manpower, is finding the ones who do not announce themselves. The quiet ones. The ones running the frauds and the white-collar schemes. The ones engaged in espionage against this country. The ones sitting in our finest universities and our research labs, the ones who came here not to build a life but to take what we built. Rooting those people out is slow, painstaking, patient work. That is why the budget went up. Not to terrorize the field hand. To hunt the spy. And to the worry about the workforce, the worry about who will pick the crops and clean the tables and pour the concrete, I say look at the McDonald's down the road. Look at the kiosk where the cashier used to stand. Technology and machines are stepping into the jobs that illegal labor held for far too long, the jobs where wages were suppressed for decades so that a few could profit while American workers were told there was nothing for them. The watch on my wrist tells the same story. I have a fine old Rolex that I wore every day for years, a beautiful piece of machinery. I still love it. But I do not wear it daily anymore. I wear a smart watch, because it does more. There will always be a place for the old dumb watch, for the carrier, for the things that are proven and reliable. But the future belongs to the smart one. The same is true of the soldier and the machine. Yes, this means our boomers will work a few years longer. And I will tell you something. That is not a tragedy. That is a blessing. A man or a woman who stays engaged, who gets up and goes among other people, who travels and gathers with folks who share their values and their pride, that person lives longer and lives better. Retirement spent alone and isolated, that is what breaks people. The country needs them, and they need the country. And let me say a real word here about travel, because it matters more than people think, and because it is close to my own heart of doing what you like, are good and profitable at, and can control. You see, a man and a woman were not made to spend their last good years staring at a wall. They were made to move, to see country, to break bread with people who share their values, their manners, and their love of this nation. There is a reason the old wagon trains went west together, why folks headed the same direction and living by the same code threw in with one another for the long haul. The trail was hard, but the company made it a joy. I believe that truth so deeply I built my life's work on it, and those who know me have heard me say, I only work with nice people. Well, with that said, I recently founded another company, a travel agency, and I staffed it with like-minded people. We host Republican cruises and other voyages for folks who share a common spirit. And I will tell you what I long known, gather a group of like-minded people and point them at the horizon, and something fine happens that you simply cannot manufacture among strangers. The friendships are real, and they last. The laughter comes easier. Everything runs smoother and truer, because nobody is fighting the current. It is more efficient and more effective, every single time, regardless of the business venture. And that is no small observation, because it is the very same lesson now playing out on a far grander stage. It is what President Trump is rebuilding across this government, what the military is rediscovering as it retools, what ICE is restoring at the line. When the people pulling the oars pull in the same direction, by the same code, toward the same horizon, you get more done, and you get it done right. The years that were meant to be the lonely ones become the very best ones. Travel done right, among people of like mind, is not an indulgence. It is medicine for the soul, and one of the great quiet blessings of a free and prosperous nation. And yes, there will be inflation, because there has always been inflation. Deflation is the rare bird. That is not the end of the world. It is the price of a labor market built on Americans again instead of on a permanent underclass kept quiet and kept cheap. Because here is the thing those biased men will never understand. When I talk about a homogeneous nation, I am not talking about where a man was born or the color of his skin. I am talking about a mindset. A shared belief. Pride in America. The plain conviction that you are an American first, last, and everything in between. Not a hyphenated anything. Just an American. When people come together around that one shared thing, they build cathedrals and they build fleets. When you throw a thousand people together who share nothing, no values, no manners, no common purpose, you get chaos. Any honest man who has watched it happen knows it is true. Likeness of heart is what lets a free people build great things. That is the American theme, and it was nearly lost, surrendered by too many administrations that turned the whole order upside down and let every corrosive idea run loose in our schools and our barracks. Those days are over. We are coming home to it. So let me bring the storm back into view, and let me tell you how it ends, because that is the part worth knowing. The fight everyone in Washington feels coming is the fight over Taiwan. Taiwan makes the chips that run the entire modern world, every phone, every car, every weapon, including ours. If China is foolish enough to reach out and take that island by force, they will discover the oldest lesson there is. Be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it. They will not capture those factories. They will capture rubble. And they will start a war they cannot win. Now I want to be precise with my words, because words matter. There is a difference between decimation, devastation, and annihilation, and a wise man knows which is which. Decimation is to lose a tenth, a hard blow you survive and rebuild from. Devastation is worse. Devastation is to be laid waste, to lose nearly everything, a fragment left standing in the ash. Annihilation is the end of the line. Nothing remains. Nobody to mourn and nobody to rebuild. If China crosses that water, they will not be decimated. They will be devastated, and they will stand one short step from annihilation. That is not a boast. That is mutual assured destruction, the same cold arithmetic that kept the peace for fifty years. The whole purpose of every dollar in that budget, every drone, every retooled ship, every silent autonomous submarine waiting in the deep, is to make that arithmetic so clear and so terrible that the war never comes at all. The best fight a man ever wins is the one his enemy is too wise to start. Henry Kaiser built fifty ships nobody believed in, and they turned back the greatest battleship ever launched. We are building the next arsenal right now, in plain sight, and the same doubters are laughing at it the same way the admirals laughed at him. Let them laugh. The wind has already changed. I can feel it off the ridge, and so can you, if you are quiet enough to listen. That is the story behind the headlines. The part the popular men leave out. And now you know the rest of it. With that I am done. Tippecanoe and Tyler Too, Click, Click, I'm done.