Hardpoints

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Every week, former fighter pilots and current entrepreneurs Neal Rickner & Mike Smith provide unfiltered insights into the biggest stories in startups, energy, and national security.

  1. 1 天前

    The Pentagon Wants $54 Billion for Drones, Up From $226 Million. Does It Need a Four-Star for Robots?

    The Pentagon is asking for $54.6 billion for autonomous warfare next year — up from about $226 million this year. That same week, Secretary Hegseth announces a new four-star Autonomous Warfare Command, the 12th combatant command in American history, and Ukraine says drones caused nearly all of the roughly 35,000 Russian casualties it counted in March. Mike and Neal ask whether the United States is finally admitting that the next century of war belongs to machines, and whether a new four-star command is the right way to get there. They walk through what was announced at Quantico — a command with service-like authorities, new drone career fields in the Army, Navy, and Air Force, an interim team called Project Agincourt, and a future-warfare panel co-led by Elon Musk, Palmer Luckey, and Newt Gingrich. They also dig into the cost math behind it all — cheap drones against expensive interceptors, tanks pulling back from the front, and why quantity now matters as much as quality. Neal sees a necessary break from the old system, pointing to the SOCOM model of giving a new mission its own budget and buying power so it can't lose every fight to the next fighter jet or ship. Mike likes the direction but worries a twelfth command adds bureaucracy, and he wants the new four-star to start by getting close to the fight in Ukraine, where tactics are being written in real time. For Mike, the real test is whether the command can change how the Army and Navy fight, not just run its own program. Both hosts flag the conflict of interest in putting people whose companies do business with the Pentagon on the panel that shapes its future. Still, Mike, who runs Aclymate, and Neal, who runs Airloom, take the founder's view — launch it, bring in smart people, and iterate — while keeping a healthy dose of skepticism about who is writing the rules. In the listener mailbag, one commenter argues the U.S. is simply turning up the heat on Canada until it comes to the table, and another wonders whether China is safer than American AI executives. Mike and Neal push back on both — covering what it costs to treat an ally like an adversary, why China is not the safer bet, and why Mike would hold AI developers to a strict liability standard. In goods, bads, and others, Mike cheers a Michigan credit union for parting ways with its CEO after an AI-edited "Lake America" sweatshirt photo, groans at Senator Eric Schmitt's perjury accusation against Jack Smith and the Hawks versus Hawkeyes moment that followed, and tracks private investment in nature growing fivefold to more than $14 billion a year. Neal salutes seven F-22 pilots awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, six of them for Operation Midnight Hammer, laments the Ratepayer Protection Act stalling in the Senate after passing the House 417 to 3, and reflects on the last U.S. troops leaving Iraq after 23 years. Got a take? Email us: hardpoints.show@gmail.com Follow Hardpoints wherever you get your podcasts.

  2. 6 天前

    Anduril's CEO Says Defense Tech Is a Bubble. So Why Is His Company Talking $100 Billion?

    Anduril's valuation doubled from $30.5 billion to $61 billion in under a year, and the company is reportedly in talks with investors at close to $100 billion. Its revenue more than doubled to $2.2 billion last year, but $100 billion works out to roughly 45 times that number, while the traditional defense primes trade at low single-digit multiples. Anduril's own CEO, Brian Schimpf, says there is a bit of a bubble. Mike and Neal agree. The real question is what happens to the Pentagon, and to the taxpayer, when it pops. The conversation starts with who these companies actually are. Anduril was founded in 2017 by Palmer Luckey, who had just been fired from Facebook after selling Oculus, along with co-founders who came out of Palantir. It is named after a sword from The Lord of the Rings. It began with border security and now builds the Lattice battlefield software platform along with drones, interceptors, and missiles. Mach Industries is a very different company. Ethan Thornton founded it in 2023 after dropping out of MIT at 19, and it builds five autonomous systems, from a vertical takeoff jet drone to a cheap counter-drone interceptor. Mach's valuation went from $470 million in June 2025 to $3.7 billion this month, and it does not disclose revenue. How did we get here? Mike and Neal trace the Pentagon's path from hundreds of prime contractors in World War II to a handful, and what that did to competition and cost. Fighter programs take decades, and the F-35 keeps growing past a trillion dollars. Mike calls it regulatory capture. Neal adds that the primes got brilliant at building exquisite, expensive hardware just as software became the more important half of the fight, and startups could iterate faster than Boeing or Northrop ever could. Add Silicon Valley's change of heart — from the Google employee revolt over defense work to founders who now want to build for the military — and the Pentagon's attempt to play matchmaker through the Defense Innovation Unit, and the opening for a new kind of prime is obvious. Both hosts give Secretary Hegseth credit for going after how acquisition programs are run, even as they disagree about almost everything that follows. Then the money. Defense tech venture funding hit $12.3 billion in the first half of the year by one PitchBook count, more than all of last year. Anduril is growing fast and guiding to roughly double its revenue again, but it is still losing money. Neal brings the founder's view. As the CEO of Airloom, he has given and received the same advice — Uncle Sam is both the best and worst customer, with big contracts but lumpy revenue that startups cannot wait two years for. A dual-use company can raise private capital and win defense dollars, and each helps the other. It also has a civilian market to fall back on if it never becomes a program of record. Mike, the founder of Aclymate, remembers a veterans founder meetup where dual use was the whole play, and notes that companies now go straight to defense. He asks what the dual-use story is for a battlefield sensor fusion company. That is where the two split. Mike is skeptical of how the neo primes got where they are. He points to insider connections and no-bid contracts, and to companies that used to say "if we build it, they will come" now asking for money up front. In his view, they are starting to behave like the old cartel, with venture capital pushing toward a few winners and everyone else acquired or wiped out. He says he knows good people at Anduril and does not know Luckey personally, but the pattern reminds him of past eras of confident outsiders who did not understand the underlying systems. Neal reads the motives more generously. He sees real patriotism and a technologist solving a real problem, and in his own experience in the trenches, he has watched people win on merit and questionable technology lose. His argument is that America fell behind on defense innovation, private capital showed up, entrepreneurs followed, and the warfighter gets better technology as a result. They agree on the essentials — there is a bubble, and the status quo was never acceptable. So what should happen instead? Mike wants the Pentagon to open the playing field so venture capital cannot squeeze the market. That means giving the services more discretion to buy every year and keeping enough competition that margins get squeezed instead of exploding. Neal wants the Pentagon agile enough to bet heavily on Mach and Anduril today and on something completely different next year. The shared answer is a wider field, more frequent purchasing from more suppliers, programs that can change direction, and dual-use companies that can survive if Washington does not buy on a straight line. In the mailbag, a viewer in Nottingham asks whether Mike and Neal miss flying the F/A-18. Mike says it was a blast, but he has filled out that part of his life. Neal says he misses it and would have flown until the day he died. An electrician of 40 years says nearly every electrical device is made in China. Mike pushes back — the United States is still the number two manufacturing power, and the higher-end the product, the more likely it is built here. Goods, bads, and others — Mike's good is $1.9 billion from the Department of Energy for 31 grid projects across 26 states, which he credits to Secretary Wright as a key unlock for American energy security. His bad is ProPublica's reporting on Senator Susan Collins and a defense contractor's $150,000 donation, routed through a shell company, to a pro-Collins super PAC. Collins denies wrongdoing, and Mike uses the story to argue for deeper reform of how defense acquisition and funding work. His other is the Pentagon's new wargame-style evaluation for officers seeking their first star, which he calls a reasonable start while arguing the military needs to do far more to develop strategic thinkers. Neal's good is Mexico's energy ministry projecting 80 percent wind growth by 2030, to 15 gigawatts, while American wind slows down. His bad is the Wall Street Journal report that President Trump rejected Iran's seven-day ceasefire proposal and expects to resume bombing after the midterms. His other is the Pentagon asking industry how fast it can build more weapons, a reminder that the country is not ready for the next conflict. Got a take? Email us: hardpoints.show@gmail.com Follow Hardpoints wherever you get your podcasts.

  3. 9月24日

    417 to 3: Congress Finally Agreed on Your Power Bill — And It Still Didn't Matter

    The price of keeping the lights on in America's largest grid went from $29 a megawatt-day to $329 in two years. Utilities have already asked regulators for billions in rate hikes this year alone. And on September 16, the House of Representatives did something Congress almost never does: it passed a bill to address it, 417 to 3. Mike and Neal break down the Ratepayer Protection Act, which would require state utility commissions to consider making large data centers (100 megawatts or more at a single site) pay the full cost of the grid upgrades built to serve them, instead of spreading that cost across everyone else's electric bill. It sounds like a fix. It passed almost unanimously. And it barely does anything. The bill only requires states to consider a standard that most of them already have in some form, and one day after House passage, Senator Martin Heinrich blocked it in the Senate, arguing it doesn't go far enough and amounts to taking tech companies at their word. Mike and Neal dig into what's actually driving the price spike, the data center and AI boom eating up nearly 40% of capacity charges in PJM's last auction, and why a near-unanimous vote in an election year should make you more suspicious, not less. Mike, who runs Aclymate, makes the case that this is capitalism's weak spot: margin always gets found somewhere, and it's usually found by squeezing public goods like the grid. Neal, who runs Airloom, pushes back on writing off the bill entirely, pointing out that exit-fee liability protections are genuinely useful and have saved communities from getting stuck holding the bag when a company walks away mid-build. They also get into the wave of state-level data center moratoriums in New York and Texas, and why Congress moving fast on a toothless bill while slow-walking real reform is the actual story here. Plus: Goods, Bads, and Others covering Mike's sustainability conference, EPA rollbacks, Thomas Massie's impeachment articles against Pete Hegseth, DOE geothermal funding, rising diesel prices tied to the Ukraine war, and Canada's growing defense-tech independence from the US. And in the mailbag, listener questions on Canada's Trans Mountain pipeline and whether Canada actually needs F-35s for northern defense. Got a question or comment? Email us at hardpoints.show@gmail.com.

  4. 9月17日

    Diesel Just Hit $6 a Gallon for the First Time Ever. Can the White House Actually Fix It?

    A $20,000 drone just took out 4% of the world's oil supply, and two days later American diesel crossed $6 a gallon for the first time in history. Mike and Neal break down how a strike on Saudi Arabia's East-West pipeline — the kingdom's main workaround for the still-closed Strait of Hormuz — turned into a real cost at the pump for American truckers, and soon for everyone buying anything that rides on a truck. The strategic question underneath the headline: the White House wants to invoke a 1950s wartime production law to build out US refining capacity. Mike and Neal dig into why that fixes the wrong timeline. New refineries take years to permit and build, oil executives know the current price spike is likely temporary, and nobody is going to sink billions into a 25-year asset to solve an 18-month problem. They trace the chain back further, too — to the power vacuum in Iraq that let armed groups operate freely enough to launch a drone strike hundreds of miles into Saudi territory in the first place. The real debate of the episode is bigger than one pipeline. Neal, a former Marine and current energy founder, argues the national security case for domestic energy production over Middle East entanglement. Mike, whose company Aclymate helps businesses without in-house sustainability teams track and cut their own emissions, pushes the same conclusion from a different angle: energy independence and climate progress aren't in tension — they're the same fix wearing different hats. Both agree the real story of the week isn't the pipeline attack. It's that EV sales just hit record highs in 50 countries while the US keeps arguing about refineries. In Goods, Bads, and Others: Mike is buried under a sustainability industry summit he's hosting in Denver this week (and hoping to survive a weekend backpacking trip with 15 Boy Scouts right after). His bad goes to the treatment of political refugees in immigration detention, and his other flags BlackRock's public acknowledgment that markets aren't pricing in climate risk — paired with skepticism about whether the money will actually follow the words. Neal's good is the EU stepping up with a new air and missile defense package for Ukraine, his bad is the end of "duration of status" protections for international students, and his other is Amazon suspending a cargo carrier partnership after a fatal runway crash. Got a question or a take on today's episode? Email the show at hardpoints.show@gmail.com — we read every one and might feature yours on a future episode. And if you're finding value in these conversations, share the show with someone who'd get something out of it too.

  5. 9月15日

    We Tariffed Hockey Sticks and Exempted the Oil We Actually Need

    At 12:01 AM on September 8, Canada's counter-tariffs went live — roughly 700 American products tiered at 15, 25, and 50 percent, covering nearly 28 billion Canadian dollars in goods, with steel and aluminum doubling from 25 to 50 percent. It started in July when the US reached for Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930 — a statute that had sat unused for 96 years — to hit Canada with 50 percent duties on alcohol, dairy, and motor vehicles, plus an annex that quietly reaches into cement, plywood, cosmetics, and wigs. Hockey equipment got caught in the alcohol annex. But here's the part nobody's talking about: the American list explicitly carves out energy, potash, critical minerals, and fish. Mike and Neal spend this episode reading the exemptions instead of the headlines, asking what it means that Washington tariffed wigs and hockey sticks while leaving 4.5 million barrels of Canadian crude untouched. Mike walks through the mechanics of Section 338 and argues the exemption list is itself a confession — Canada supplies well over half of US crude imports, and Midwest refineries are built specifically to run the heavy sour crude that comes down from Alberta. Switching that feedstock means capital projects, not phone calls. With diesel prices near record highs and a midterm election on the horizon, exempting oil wasn't generosity — it was math. Neal, who runs an energy company, pushes back that tariffing hockey sticks is theater while tariffing 4.5 million barrels a day is a decision with a body count in gasoline prices — and the US blinked on the one lever that actually hurts. From there the conversation moves to defense. Reporting on the collapsed trade talks says Washington wanted Canada to finish its F-35 buy, purchase American radar aircraft for Golden Dome, and grant the US right of first refusal on Canadian critical minerals. Canada has funded only 16 of its planned 88 F-35As and set no timeline on the rest, while Saab pitches a mixed fleet built partly in Canada. Mike and Neal talk through what that means for NORAD — an alliance built on shared aircraft and shared radar coverage across the pole — and why degrading that interoperability is far easier than rebuilding it. They close on the number that matters most: Canada's economy grew at a 3.3 percent annualized rate in the second quarter, more than double the 1.5 percent US rate, while Prime Minister Carney's support keeps climbing and Canada builds a new pipeline to sell its oil to Asia instead. Mike argues the pressure campaign may be building the very competitor it was meant to break — that Canada now has what America used to have: reliability. The founder read here isn't investment advice — it's a warning that a North American supply chain that used to be one market is quietly becoming two. In the mailbag, Mike and Neal take on a listener pushing back on shutting down a dedicated drone training unit — arguing that real war, not simulation, is still the best teacher for drone warfare — and share a lighter note on chasing better weather this fall. For Goods, Bads, and Others, Mike's good is the record year for solar, which met 75 percent of new US electricity demand growth in 2025 while fossil generation actually fell; his bad is a second sabotage attempt on Germany's power grid alongside European gas prices hitting their highest level since 2023; and his other is the chaos of an office move layered on top of an already packed fall schedule. Neal's good is the Army opening its live-fire test ranges to private industry so drone and electronic warfare tech can be tested at the pace war actually moves; his bad is South Korea's Navy turning to a humanoid robot helmsman because it can't recruit enough sailors; and his other is the eyebrow-raising jobs report showing 98 percent of August's job gains went to women. If you have a question or comment about today's show, send it to hardpoints.show@gmail.com and you might hear it on a future episode. Follow Hardpoints wherever you get your podcasts, and share it with someone who'll appreciate it — or someone who won't.

  6. 9月10日

    Trump's Grid Emergency Order Bans the Two Technologies Actually Fixing the Grid

    Nine days before this recording, the White House declared a national emergency over the American power grid—not about blackouts, but about who built the equipment. Mike and Neal dig into the executive order banning foreign-made grid hardware, and the twist that makes it interesting: the two technologies growing fastest on the grid right now, utility-scale batteries and inverters, sit squarely in the supply chain the order restricts. Neal, who's building Airloom around exactly this kind of supply chain risk, makes the case that this order is a real improvement over its failed 2020 predecessor, with a vendor pre-qualification process, a mitigation pathway, and reliability safeguards the last version lacked. Mike agrees the threat is real, pointing to documented cases of embedded communications equipment in Chinese-made inverters, but pushes back hard on where the authority lands: one Cabinet secretary now decides which hardware stays on the grid, with no funding attached and no guarantee it outlasts this administration. The two spend real time on the order's central contradiction: it declares an emergency over AI-driven electricity demand, then restricts the fastest-growing source of new capacity meeting that demand. California just crossed a real milestone here, generating more than half its power from solar for an entire month in May, largely because batteries are shifting that supply into the evening. Mike and Neal disagree on how much of this is legitimate security policy versus a play that quietly favors gas. They close on where the founder opportunity actually lives: American-made transformer and inverter manufacturing, provenance and firmware attestation software, and the flexible supply chains the solar industry already learned to build through a decade of policy whiplash. In the mailbag, a comment on the Army's drone school segment sparks a conversation about why decentralized decision-making is winning in Ukraine. Then Goods, Bads, and Others: Mike commends Army Secretary Dan Driscoll for resigning over a clash with Pete Hegseth, is furious about a Naval Academy midshipman's mother being detained by ICE, and is watching the stalled state of the war with Iran. Neal highlights carbon-capturing fungi as a real climate opportunity, calls out the hidden cost of local news dying under social media, and reflects on Aaron Rodgers' retirement as a window into how hard transitions out of a defining career really are. Got a question or comment? Email us at hardpoints.show@gmail.com.

  7. 9月3日

    West Point Fired Its Only Climate Scientist

    West Point just fired the only climate scientist on its faculty. Seventeen years of uniformly outstanding reviews, tenure, a grant to research weather systems for troop protection, and Dr. Adam Kalkstein still lost his job this spring after refusing an order to scrub human causes of climate change from his curriculum. Mike and Neal dig into the lawsuit, the meeting where a two-star general reportedly stormed out of the room, and what it says about where the service academies are headed. This one goes beyond a single professor. Mike and Neal unpack why climate change might be the single largest threat multiplier facing national security right now, driving crop failures, water scarcity, and the kind of mass migration that destabilizes governments from Syria to the Sahel. Neal draws on his own time landing in the Pacific and watching entire islands disappear underwater. Mike pulls from a paper he wrote on climate and national security years before this became a live political fight. The question underneath all of it: if young officers aren't allowed to learn the full picture, how are they supposed to make good decisions when the stakes are highest? From there the conversation turns to what actually makes a good warfighter. Is it push ups, or is it the ability to think critically with incomplete information and decentralized authority, the very thing that's supposedly made the US military different from centralized command structures like Russia's or Germany's? Neal brings in his own experience on the ground in Ramadi, where junior enlisted leaders were making real battlefield calls with the kind of context that only comes from real education. Mike makes the case that hollowing out the officer corps' capacity to think strategically is its own long-term national security risk, separate from anything about ideology. As someone building a carbon accounting company, Mike has a direct stake in how seriously institutions treat climate data, and that shows up in how bluntly he pushes back on the idea that this is a fair fight between two equally valid opinions. Neal takes the opposite lane, arguing the better fix for bad ideas is always more speech, not censorship, even when the speech in question is bad faith. The mailbag gets loud this week. Two listeners weigh in on the Abraham Lincoln deployment story from a previous episode, arguing sailors going overboard is just something that happens. Mike and Neal, both combat veterans, aren't having it, and make the case that dismissing anyone's breaking point, whether it's a ten month deployment without a port call or thirteen months on a mountainside in Kandahar, is exactly the wrong lesson to take from military service. Goods, Bads, and Others this week: Mike's Orioles are creeping back toward a wild card spot, the Potsdam Institute confirms global warming has nearly doubled its pace over the last decade, and the new US-Venezuela oil deal raises real questions about propping up an unelected government for the sake of energy access. Neal covers a DOE loan to shore up Puerto Rico's grid, steep new Colorado River cuts hitting Arizona hardest, and Iceland's surprise vote against reopening EU accession talks. Got a question or a take? Send it to hardpoints.show@gmail.com and you might hear it on the next episode.

  8. 9月1日

    The Army Killed Its Drone School While Ordering Every Division to Buy Them. So Who's Actually Learning How to Fight?

    Mike and Neal open episode 63 with a contradiction that should worry anyone paying attention to how the Pentagon actually works: the Army stood up a unit in January with one job—fly to Kyiv, learn how Ukraine actually fights a drone war, and bring the lessons home. Eight months later, that unit—the Unmanned Assault Battalion under the 173rd Airborne Brigade in Vicenza, Italy—is being folded back into a standard airborne infantry battalion. At the same time, Secretary Hegseth is ordering every Army division to field a thousand drones and canceling the 42-ton M10 Booker to help pay for it, while pushing to replace crewed attack helicopters with drone swarms. Mike and Neal spend the episode asking how both things can be true at once. Mike lays out the case bluntly: this is not a resourcing problem, it's a leadership failure. The two generals who championed the drone unit and personally met with Ukrainian commanders have both since been pushed out. Mike compares it to how the Navy handled a similar crisis during Vietnam, when a small group of junior officers built Top Gun out of a trailer and rewrote air-to-air combat doctrine. His point: if the Army needs the airborne battalion back on its core mission, fine—but pull the fifteen best people out first and stand up a real center of excellence. Nobody is doing that. Neal pushes back with a founder's read on the situation, drawing on his own experience running Airloom, an emerging energy company navigating fast-moving hardware cycles. He agrees the money side is smart: canceling a vehicle nobody wanted to fund a capability everybody needs is good instinct. But speed without doctrine is how you end up with expensive hardware and no idea how to fight with it, and Ukraine is proving that lesson gets rewritten daily, not annually. The two go deep on why doctrine matters as much as the hardware itself, using the Marine Corps' MAGTF model as the throughline: assets only work together because units train together and share doctrine, not because the equipment showed up on time. Neal draws on his own year as a forward air controller in an infantry battalion, where nobody had been trained to fly the three drones they were issued, and all three were destroyed before ever reaching Iraq. That personal detail becomes the strongest argument in the episode for why handing drones to units without dedicated, trained operators is a recipe for wasted equipment and worse outcomes. The conversation also digs into the harder tradeoff nobody in the Pentagon seems to be resolving yet—whether attack helicopters can really be replaced by cheap drone swarms—with Neal defending the sheer massed firepower a helicopter brings to a ground fight in a way no drone currently matches. They also touch on the industrial side of this shift, referencing the Replicator initiative and the reality that the US is still only on track to produce a fraction of the drones it will eventually need, and that flexible, modular platforms—not the flashiest single drone—are what actually win production races. Goods, Bads, and Others this week: Mike's good is a weekend with his nephew and in-laws; his bad is West Point firing its only climate scientist for stating basic climate science; and his other is the USS Abraham Lincoln finally getting a port call after a brutal deployment, landing in Pattaya, Thailand, which Mike does not expect to end quietly. Neal's good is a federal judge blocking an attempt to restrict mail-in voting through the Postal Service; his bad is a reported push to strip the USS Doris Miller name from a carrier still under construction; and his other is the catastrophic glacier collapse on the Nepal-Tibet border, with the death toll climbing past five hundred and still rising. Got a question or a take on today's show? Send it to hardpoints.show@gmail.com and we might feature it on a future episode. Follow Hardpoints wherever you listen, and share it with someone who needs to hear both sides of this argument.

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簡介

Every week, former fighter pilots and current entrepreneurs Neal Rickner & Mike Smith provide unfiltered insights into the biggest stories in startups, energy, and national security.

資訊

  • 創作者
    VALOR Media Network
  • 活躍年代
    2025年 - 2026年
  • 集數
    67
  • 年齡分級
    兒少不宜
  • 版權
    © 2025
  • 節目網站
    Hardpoints

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