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Who Aims the Gun?
Military Advantage Shifts from Mass to Mind A drone rises from a field, guided in real time by a human operator watching a live video feed. The pilot sees what the drone sees: a tank comes into view. The drone accelerates. The image fills the screen. Then: static. A machine worth millions of dollars is […]
From Ammunition to Algorithms: Are Drones Already Obsolete?
By Richard Vigilante For the past several years, commentators have marveled at a new asymmetry in warfare. A drone costing a few thousand dollars can destroy a tank worth millions of dollars. A loitering munition assembled from commercial parts can disable equipment worth a thousand times its cost. For centuries, military advantage flowed from industrial […]
Elon, Pete, and the Drone Wars
71 days. That’s how long it took Venom, a powerful, new, U.S. autonomous strike aircraft (aka a drone) to move from concept to flying prototype. 71 days. In traditional aerospace terms, that is almost indecent. For decades, the path from concept to first flight has stretched across years. Requirements proliferated with each committee’s two cents. […]
AI Boom or Bust?
Earnings seasons announcements are beginning to sound awfully repetitive. The hyperscalers are spending tens of billions on AI infrastructure. Data center construction is accelerating. Power demand forecasts are rising. NVIDIA’s (NASDAQ: NVDA) valuation implies demand outstripping supply of GPUs (graphical processing units) for years to come. Naturally, everyone wants to know if this is sustainable […]
No, You Can’t Just ‘Bring the Platforms Home’
After we wrote about Israel’s progress from Start-Up Nation to “platform nation,” a reader asked a perfectly reasonable question: If platform companies are so important, why don’t we just bring them home? Why not subsidize them, relocate them, and require them to operate in the United States? As a reminder, a platform is an enabling […]
Thank You, Amazon
I love Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN). I have felt this way for a long time but ever so much more since I have become effectively (and I hope temporarily) disabled. I walk on a cane—very slowly. I no longer drive. Shopping is a horror. And every day I am grateful that AMZN is so darn big, […]
Israel Grows Up
All the world knows Israel as a “Start-Up Nation,” the world’s most prolific source of innovative technology companies. But in mainstream sectors such as banking, telecom, and even retail, Israel for many decades stifled competition—and with it, innovation. That began to change in the mid-2000s. A combination of regulatory reform and the market forces those […]
The Smart Money Was Always on David
Children hear the story David vs. Goliath as a great, and surprising, victory for the underdog. The truth is that David was the odds-on favorite from the outset. David could be sure of launching a stone at Goliath before the giant ever got within sword’s length. Even more important, if David missed, he could shoot […]
The Supply Chain ‘Ain’t’ What It Used to Be
The big goal of industrial policy advocates these days is to “reshore” the supply chain, for instance, by moving semiconductor manufacturing back to the United States. What the industrial policy-types miss is that in our economy, in which all wealth is knowledge and all growth is learning, the real supply chain is equally immaterial. Today […]
Factories Are Easy; Learning Is Hard—Why Industrial Policy Keeps Funding the Wrong Layer
Never think about “protectionism versus free trade.” What we call protectionism is simply industrial policy by another name. The decision to protect certain industries is simply a decision to shift intellectual and material capital towards that industry. The CHIPS act subsidizing the building of new semiconductor “fabs” (manufacturing sites) capacity is all about tariffs and […]