INVEST MINERALS

“It's structured to deal with the fundamental problem, which has plagued industry the past 20 years. Lack of coherent demand. FITIP's up one year, it's the most important thing in the world. Next year, the FITIP says, I don't even remember that program. I can't remember. Then the next year, it's back up again. That's chaos. It's why would anybody invest in that? How does anybody know how much capacity to invest? By stabilizing the demand, we give industry the signal that has asked for, that is, we have a clear path for demand.”

“Traditional multi-year contracts basically were good for the prime. Maybe it's good for a couple of the key suppliers that do like the rocket mover, the seeker, pick your piece. But those folks were never required to flow cash down into the supply chain and lock in the demand. With this deal, we're essentially demanding that the companies lock in the pricing and the availability components of the suppliers all the way through the supply chain and down. That means that those suppliers at every level have stability. They know that there's a buy for them over seven years.”

“The other thing that was most bipartisan and common was why are things so messed up? And I think that was truly a striking thing that they're like, we've given you a trillion dollars, we've given you authorities, we've given you all the authorities you want, maybe not as much as you want. Yes, occasionally we make you buy aircraft you don't want to buy, but that's on the edges. We really want you to do well, and yet you come back every year and ask for more money and more authorities. Yet if you look at the GAO reports, I mean, huge amount of problems have continued on or gotten worse over the past decade.”

“If we get in a conflict, right, and we're unprepared, we get in a conflict because we were unprepared, nothing good comes from that. We don't want to lose. I took this job and left my very successful commercial career because I refuse to watch happen in the industrial base what's been happening for a long time. I don't want to lose. And so I'm going to leave this job knowing I tried everything I can. And I'm trying to enlist as many folks as I can in that process going forward.”

“The issue isn't demand. People want our weapons. The issue is that people are buying weapons they know they're not going to get for 8 or 10 years, because there isn't enough production capacity. So we could streamline the FMS and DCS processes all we want, and we will. But the problem is there still won't be any more production capacity. So there's just no more apples in the bushel. And so we're all arguing over the last couple apples. And so to me, what we're really excited is like planting more trees. We need more apples in the basket.”

“I think structurally the difference in approach, and you've seen that across all of our minerals deals, of which we've done, I don't know, a billion and a half just out of my portfolio of work, is that instead of investing around the edges, 5 million here, 10 million here, which has been the traditional approach, we've invested hundreds of millions of dollars in deals, coupled that with hundreds of millions of dollars of debt from Office of Strategic Capital, coupled with private capital as well. That's the scale of investments needed to really make a difference in some of these mineral markets.”

“I actually, I've told everybody, I've spent more time on chemistry than I have since 10th grade. I have periodic table of the elements. It's taped to the wall, right near my desk, because people are calling me about one unumtanium or another every single day. Truly, gallium, germanium, yttrium, the entire actinide and lanthanide series. You start to learn these things. You talk about atomic numbers and weights and metals and salts. It's an incredible education. And I have a bunch of brilliant chemists that work for me in a whole bunch of places, all of them who could make more money and hedge funds.”

“I think, look, if you go back, the department's been trying to get Silicon Valley to play in defense for 20 years. Go back to 2005 and all the crypto libertarian crowd were gonna float around in their islands and utopian. They were never gonna deal with us nasty countries in war. Peace had broken out in the Pacific somehow. They've all come back around, right? They've all come to the department. They all want to play. They all want contracts. They all want to be let in.”

“My favorite book on this subject, obviously, is Freedom's Forge. And so it's a great book. And at the end of the day, the opportunity, I think the book, people think, you know, it's America's great and America is great, but that isn't why the book is great. The issue is because that guy Bill Knudsen every day got on a plane and went to a factory and he sat down with people and he solved problems, right? It was the most tactical thing. He sat down with engineers and businessmen, factories, every single day across this company.”

“It's incredibly important that we recognize the validity, the dignity, the quality, and the lifestyle you can have working as a skilled trademan in the United States or in any organization, but also within the Department of Defense as part of the DIB. And that's really important for me personally, because I think it's been underappreciated. We have huge challenges. You make a lot of money as a welder doing cool stuff on the factory floor or at a shipyard. And we want to make sure that's available to the next generation of people. And it's AI proof.”