“We are not prepared for anything”: the head of Anduril explains why the US is lagging in the arms race — and where the lesson of Ukraine really works

In Washington, an alarming formula is increasingly heard: the US may not be ready for a prolonged war with a comparable adversary. Christian Brose, President and Director of Strategy at Anduril Industries, speaks about this without diplomacy: the American planning and procurement system is too slow, and the industrial base is set up as if the conflict will be short and “convenient.”

In a conversation with the host of the School of War podcast he explains why the lessons of Ukraine cannot simply be copied for a war with China and what needs to change before it’s too late.

Brose is not a blogger or an outside commentator. He worked as the chief advisor to Senator John McCain on national security, led the staff of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and saw closed briefings on the real balance of power between the US and China. This, he says, prompted him to write the book The Kill Chain — about how America is losing pace.

“The kill chain” in his explanation is not poetry or a term from a presentation. It is the three basic steps of any operation: understand what is happening, make a decision, strike. The problem he describes sounds primitive and therefore unpleasant: the US takes these steps too slowly, and the Pentagon’s bureaucracy struggles to digest technologies that should accelerate the cycle.

Why “a small amount of superweapons” stopped working

Brose links the current crisis of thinking to the model in which America lived after the Cold War. It seemed normal then to rely on a small number of very expensive, very complex systems. Everything was adjusted to this: requirements, procurement, timelines, control. Inside was the assumption: if war happens, it will last days or weeks, losses will be few, and munitions will not be “consumed” by the ton.

Ukraine and the Middle East, in his logic, break this picture. Modern war is months and years, enormous consumption of equipment and ammunition, constant adaptation. And if you are not used to quickly changing production and quickly learning, you fall into a trap: technologically you seem strong, but operationally sluggish.

A separate blow to self-confidence is China. Brose speaks directly about parity in several areas and that the former “default dominance” is no longer guaranteed. Not tomorrow. Already now.

The “root of the problem” is not a lack of money, but the logic of the system

In his story, much attention is paid not to hardware, but to procedures. He returns to the PPBE system (planning, programming, budgeting, evaluation), which sets the Pentagon’s rhythm for 10–15 years ahead. This logic can work when requirements are clear and almost unchanged. But it falls apart in a world where technologies are updated faster than one budget cycle passes.

He emphasizes that the main investments in research and development today do not come from the state. They come from the private sector, from commercial technologies, from companies accustomed to iterations and speed. And the state continues to think in terms of control and linear execution of “programs.”

Brose formulates an unpleasant conclusion: the US has enough authority and money — the question is not “what is hindering us,” but “what do we want to build at all and how quickly are we ready to restructure.” And this, he says, is more frightening than another bureaucratic excuse.

Ukraine: not to copy FPV, but to copy the pace

The most important place in his position on Ukraine is anti-romanticization. He says: the temptation is great — to see effective tactical solutions (FPV, new management methods, cheap drones) and decide that it is enough to simply scale them for a conflict with China.

But the theater in the western part of the Pacific Ocean is different: it is maritime, the distances are huge, the opponent is more powerful, the logistics are more complex. Therefore, direct “copying of systems” is a trap.

The lesson he considers universal is the speed of learning and industrial flexibility. Inexpensive expendable systems, mass production, rapid iteration “battlefield → development → production → battlefield again.” Not a specific drone model, but the ability to restructure the system every week, because in a year the set of effective means will already be different.

Anduril and the bet on mass production

After the Senate, Brose went to Anduril Industries — a defense startup that wants to bring back the logic of “production at scale” to defense, rather than “production in single mode.” The company is building Arsenal-1 in Ohio — a site of 4–5 million square feet for the mass assembly of autonomous combat systems.

The meaning of the project is not in one product, but in a platform that can be quickly reconfigured for new tasks. Instead of spreading supply chains to the maximum for political support, they are trying to gather production in one campus to switch faster between products, people, lines, and components.

An important detail of his story: this is not the classic scheme “the Pentagon gave money — the plant was built.” He emphasizes the company’s investments and the support of the state of Ohio, plus the idea that the necessary workforce should be more massive, closer to the industrial base of the automotive industry and commercial aerospace, and not exclusively to narrow elite competencies.

AI, autonomy, and air defense: “automate or lose”

Where he sounds almost unequivocal is in air and missile defense. He describes the problem of scale: not a single attack, but waves of hundreds and thousands of means of destruction again and again. In such conditions, human “manual” decision processing becomes a bottleneck.

He draws a line through Israeli and Ukrainian experience: when you need to defend constantly, data processing technologies, automation, and elements of autonomy become not a fashion, but a condition for survival.

At the same time, he acknowledges the political and ethical difference between defense and offense: democratic societies will be more cautious with autonomy in offensive operations. But defensive automation, in his logic, will be implemented faster because it is easier to justify as a way to protect people.

What he considers the main risk

Not “lack of technology.” But that the US continues to live with peacetime bureaucracy, preparing for a war that will require mobilization discipline, industrial speed, and constant revision of approaches.

In short: America may have the best engineering ideas but lose in the pace of implementation and production.

That is why the conversation about China, Ukraine, autonomous systems, and factories in Ohio sounds not like a discussion within the defense industry, but as a question of whether the world’s largest military power will have time to restructure before facing a “resilience” conflict — this is what NAnews — News of Israel | Nikk.Agency captures when writing about a new reality where industrial speed and decision speed once again become strategic weapons.