ChinaTalk

Ukrainian drone manufacturing. How has the country been able to build hundreds of thousands, even millions of drones over the past four years of conflict? What dependencies does its industrial base still have on China? And what lessons does its rapid scaling offer for the rest of the world?

To discuss, we’re joined by Cat Buchatskiy, Director of Analytics at Snake Island, a military analytical group, along with Chris Miller

Our conversation covers:


How battlefield pressure forced Ukraine to build a drone war machine from scratch — from a handful of soldiers flying off-the-shelf drones to domestic assembly at a massive scale.


Ukraine’s industrial legacy and whole-of-society mobilization repurposed its civilian tech sector into a wartime industrial base.


Why modular design, frontline reassembly, and tight feedback loops allow Ukraine to iterate faster than traditional defense systems.


The constraints of global supply chains, the impact of export controls, and how China is playing both sides of the war.

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An F-15E is down in southern Iran. Justin, Tony, Eric and I talk through what combat search and rescue actually looks like, how a captured pilot changes the politics of ending this war, and why a hostage makes the "pack up and go home" play functionally impossible.

Then: the AWACS that "only" lost a third of itself on a Saudi tarmac, why CENTCOM is still parking high-value aircraft like it's 2003, and what Operation Spiderweb and three years of Ukrainian drone warfare should have taught us but didn't. Plus Pete Hegseth's ongoing purge of the officer corps, the Enron theory of Pentagon innovation, and why the War of 1812 is the best analogy for where this is all heading.

Tony's article on CENTCOM sucking: https://www.breakingbeijing.com/p/what-did-we-learn-centcom

Justin on just war: https://justinmc.substack.com/p/just-war-theory

song: https://suno.com/s/vroapDDimBnmCxdO
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The history of the American federal civil service — what can we learn from its past glories and failures, and where should we take this next? We have ⁠Kevin Hawickhorst⁠ of the Foundation for American Innovation to discuss:


The Pendleton Act myth — Why civil service reform didn’t begin or end with Pendleton, and why starting the story there misses what actually made the system work.


The rise of the subject-matter state — How early 20th-century agencies staffed with real experts — entomologists, engineers, agronomists — made the U.S. bureaucracy arguably the most capable in the world.


From expertise to org charts — How mid-century functional reorganization hollowed out mission-driven agencies and replaced subject knowledge with process management.


What competence delivered — From agricultural breakthroughs to infrastructure build-out, what a serious, technically grounded civil service was able to accomplish.


Whether we can rebuild — DOGE, the abundance movement, state capacity, and why this might be the best time in decades to make the government work again.

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The history of the American federal civil service — what can we learn from its past glories and failures, and where should we take this next? We have Kevin Hawickhorst of the Foundation for American Innovation to discuss:


The Pendleton Act myth — Why civil service reform didn’t begin or end with Pendleton, and why starting the story there misses what actually made the system work.


The rise of the subject-matter state — How early 20th-century agencies staffed with real experts — entomologists, engineers, agronomists — made the U.S. bureaucracy arguably the most capable in the world.


From expertise to org charts — How mid-century functional reorganization hollowed out mission-driven agencies and replaced subject knowledge with process management.


What competence delivered — From agricultural breakthroughs to infrastructure build-out, what a serious, technically grounded civil service was able to accomplish.


Whether we can rebuild — DOGE, the abundance movement, state capacity, and why this might be the best time in decades to make the government work again.

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Jen Pahlka is an American Hero, in a past life the US Deputy Chief Technology Officer and member of the Defense Innovation Board. She wrote Recoding America and the wonderful Eating Policy substack (https://www.eatingpolicy.com/?utm_campaign=profile_chips).
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