Transcript of Erik D. Prince on AI and the Future Battlefield

Because what’s happened in Ukraine, when the Russian army rolled in in February of 2022, I say the only smart thing that Zelensky did the entire war is he opened up the armories of Ukraine to the citizens. And the citizens took up arms and defended their country, whether it’s a rocket-propelled grenade, an anti-tank missile, a sniper rifle, whatever that was.

But the citizen innovation stopped them. And then the innovation really started. If you think about Ukraine, was probably responsible for 40% to 50% of the science and weapon innovation of the Soviet Union.

Why? Because Ukraine was on that east-west rub point, and you had a lot of European influence in Ukraine. Aircraft engines, rockets, precision missiles, ballistic missiles all came from Ukraine. And so now you had desperate people trying to defend their area.

And we’re not going to wade into the politics of the Ukraine war. I’ll get to that at the end with questions. So I’m going to talk for about a half an hour, and we’ll do Q&A at the end.

Democratization of Precision Strike

But these smart, innovative people said, we’ve got to fight all these Russian tanks and stop this massive onslaught. So they started taking hobbyist drones, and they first started with grenades, maybe the actual grenade of an RPG, the shape charge that you can drive into a tank and clock it off. And now it’s to this point, where they take a 3D printer, print a canister about this size with a copper cone on the end.

Why the copper cone? Because when you clock off the explosive, the explosive wave goes through. It turns that copper cone into a copper slug going about 8,000 feet per second, and it goes right through that tank armor, even into the back. It’s called the bustle of a T-72.

So that little FPV drone, little racing drone, wearing the goggles, we can boost the range out to 15 kilometers so that each one of you in this room can carry six of them on your back. So imagine the democratization of precision strike that that enables. And it’s cheap, right? You take a $500 to $800 drone, you lobotomize, you put some different software in it, 3D print the canister, and also you have an extra shell that you fill with steel shot.

Now you have a very potent anti-tank, anti-personnel weapon, which costs you all up probably $3,000 versus $150,000 for a Javelin missile from Raytheon with a $200,000 launcher. So that’s the kind of pendulum swing you’re seeing. And that’s before you even apply AI.

Electronic Warfare and Innovation

The thing that the Russians are very good at is electronic warfare. A lot of American stuff, Javelin missile, HIMARS, Copperhead missiles, which is a guided artillery shell, it works for a week or two. And the Russians figure out how to jam the navigation or the command link.

And the stuff goes blind. And so the most leading edge innovation at the bleeding edge of battle is really on the Ukraine front right now. And it’s literally the people operating out of their garages figuring out how to survive and innovate as compared to the hyper-bloated Pentagon, which has not really delivered a lot of innovation and certainly good value of late.

And so even into that Russian brick wall of electronic warfare, they’ve developed another thing called a, you’ve heard maybe of a TOW missile. It’s an old American missile from the 80s, tube-launched, optically tracked, wire-guided. It’s a little fiber optic that pays out of the back of it as the missile’s on its way.

Now you can put that little canister of fiber optic on the drone and fly it in a zero radio, zero communication environment out to 10 kilometers. Literally, if you had an open window, you could fly it deep inside this building to hunt. And so that’s the kind of change in warfare that’s accelerated and democratized precision strike.

What you saw in Syria just a few weeks ago, that was not some spontaneous jihadi uprising. That was actually organized and sponsored by Turkish intelligence and Turkish special operations equipped with small, simple drones. And they smashed their way through a significant Soviet era, Russian-supplied military of the Syrian Arab Army, and they conquered it.

AI on the Battlefield

So you’re going to see that kind of change. Now, even worse, if you apply, and the AI is being applied already on the edge, meaning you can put the processing of imagery, teach the device to think, and that’s also been done. And I’ve had teams operating in Ukraine, learning, trying to extract the right lessons learned for this on the ground and maritime side.

If you saw the jet skis that had significant damage in the Western Black Sea, imagine taking a jet ski, putting a nav system on it with a payload, and you send three against a Russian vessel. One of them is going to get through. It’s a significant value payback for the cost of doing those jet skis.

And now, literally, that AI is put onto, effectively, water drones like that, or aircraft or small drones, meaning you can give it an image capture, where you teach it to drive to a certain area and look to say, that’s a truck, that’s a tank, that’s a ship. And at that point, the jet ski, whatever the device is, is on its way. It’s thinking for itself, guiding itself in for the kill.

The Obsolescence of Traditional Military Assets

So what does this mean to modern warfare? It means our trillions of dollars of installed capacity of US stuff is in high danger of being obsolescent. Anything that can be located can be targeted by not tens, but hundreds of devices. And quantity has a quality all its own.

You throw enough low-cost missiles at it, it really becomes a problem. As you’ve seen in the Red Sea, you have the Houthis, a Iranian-sponsored Shia surrogate operating right along the coast on the Red Sea, one of the major shipping ways. And they’ve been shooting suicide drones, cruise missiles, even ballistic missiles at ships, dozens, hundreds of ships.

The US Navy acknowledges that they have fired a billion dollars worth of US missiles at those incoming devices to try to shoot them down. That’s a false number. It’s more like $4 or $5 billion, because the Navy accounts for what they bought it for back in 1995, not what they have to replace it for in 2025, or 2028, by the time the vendor would actually deliver.

So you have a huge asymmetry. Iranians, through the Houthis, are shooting a $20,000 drone at our billion-dollar warship. And the Navy is shooting that $20,000 drone down with not one, but two $1 million standard missiles.

Pentagon Leadership and Discipline

And so it really speaks to the value of some new leadership at the Pentagon, because we are really on the wrong path in terms of procurement, and mentality, and discipline. A tragedy happened even a couple of weeks ago, where the Navy shot down one of its own airplanes. Did you hear about that? Well, not only did they shoot one down, they, having shot the first one down, they fired missiles at the second guy.

He saw the missiles launch. I saw the message traffic from him. And he got on the afterburner and got away.

And the missile ran out of juice and hit the water underneath him. Again, those aircraft were not far off flying some patrol. They were literally in the traffic pattern, both of them on final approach to land on the carrier.

And the Navy still shot down their own stuff. So the misalignment of the Pentagon and the adriftness of discipline, recruiting, the diversity, equity, inclusion stuff is really distracted from the Navy or the military focusing on lethality and merit. And I’m optimistic that Secretary Hegseth is going to push hard to put them back on track.

I did not apply for a DOD job, but there are 42-some boards that oversee the Pentagon. And I did volunteer to take on all 42 of those boards and help them restaff and refocus on lethality and merit.

The Future of Warfare

So what does this future of warfare look like? As you look at even what’s happening in Ukraine, first of all, don’t listen to the idiot politicians that say, yeah, we’ve degraded the Russian army.

No, we have chewed up a lot of material, the Ukrainians have, killed a lot of people unnecessarily. It’s a really dumb war. The Russian army has got a lot of material.

They’ve gotten infinitely smarter. If you shot at a Russian with artillery in March or April of 2022, it would take them an hour and a half to shoot back accurately. Now, about two minutes, which means if you shoot at them, you better be in your vehicle and hauling ass because they’re going to get you otherwise.

Old Weapons, New Applications

So it is, and really, and I think this speaks to old weapons, new weapons. The tactics, or sorry, the tools may change, but a lot of the tactics remain the same. Because if you’ve heard of the Maxim machine gun, which was literally, Hiram Maxim, really the first widely fielded machine gun in the colonial wars of the late 19th century to World War II to what even used by the Germans for a while, the Ukrainians had tens of thousands of those left over in inventory from the old pre-Soviet Russian army.

And they’ve wheeled all those out because they’ve been buying 8 millimeter ammunition for those machine guns. Why? Because they’re making quad mounts of Maxim machine guns to shoot down incoming drones. Again, old made new.

And it’s not just in the Ukraine theater where the drones have been a problem. The IDF in Israel has had a hell of a problem with the small, cheap drones. Literally 50% of the small, low cost drones launched by Hezbollah coming across were getting in and hitting their targets in Israel.

At tactical level or even at strategic level. Look, the Israelis have done a magnificent job with Iron Dome and the high altitude defense. But the super low, like 10 meter, 20 meter off the ground drones were really causing mayhem.

Innovation in Defense

And again, coming back to innovation and adapting to those realities. My friend is the leading demolition contractor for quarries in Israel. And he was just disgusted of seeing attack after attack after attack.

And so what did he do? He drove to the Israeli Air Force Museum and he dragged an old M61 Vulcan cannon, okay? Which is a six barrel, 20 millimeter cannon off of a tank that was sitting at the museum that hadn’t been used in 40 years. And in a month, lobotomized it, put a Tesla battery pack on the system with a new fire control system and a new infrared camera. And you know what? That thing is sitting on post just inside the Israel border up by Lebanon on the coast.

I saw it and he’s shooting down drones every day when they fire. Innovation and discipline and focus still matters.

The China Challenge and Industrial Base

So China has an enormous industrial base, okay? 40 to 50 times the shipbuilding rate that we have.

Obviously in drones and components, a lot of those things that hollowed out the Midwest in some, I’d say some misguided trade efforts over the last 30 years have moved all that manufacturing to China. That has definitely accrued to their advantage. I think it’s very important to understand, you know, World War II, it’s in no way insulting any veterans service, but we lost, while we were still messing around in North Africa, in Algeria, in Tunisia, 1943, that same February, March period, the Soviets erased 800,000 Germans from the German order of battle at the Battle of Stalingrad.

They lost a million two of their own people doing it. We lost a total of 250,000 people for the duration of the European theater of operations. What really helped America, what really helped the allies win World War II was American industry.

If you haven’t read the book, Freedom’s Forge, I highly encourage you to do it. A lot of you are from the Midwest. I’m from the Midwest, from an automotive manufacturing family background.

And it makes me really proud to realize all those factories really cranked out and delivered that kind of capability. It made it possible for Marshal Zhukov of the Soviet Union to go all the way from Moscow to Berlin with 600,000 vehicles, trucks. Do you remember the German army that back then was only about half mechanized? We made it possible with tens of thousands of aircraft and hundreds of thousands of vehicles for the Soviets to win.

So our industrial base now is nowhere near what it needs to be right now to be competitive. And I think there’s some great efforts underway. There’s a re-industrialized conference I participated in about six months ago.

Manufacturing Resurgence and Economic Outlook

They’re having another one. If you’re in the manufacturing space, I think it’s a great time to add plant capacity because there’s going to be, I don’t know, I feel a much different vibe and a lot of demand coming back from China. I’ve stayed in the manufacturing business ourselves with plants in the US and in Mexico.

And there’s just a lot of volume coming back from Asia.

The Evolution of Warfare and Government Growth

AI and battle, as you see, well, now looking back. When you went from spears, bows, swords, to gunpowder in about 11 or 1200 and you start getting the match locks and the wheel lock muskets, it literally affected society.

Why? Because now you had to field much bigger armies and you start increasing the sophistication of the weapon systems. And as small arms became artillery, became big complex artillery, became siege artillery, became then aircraft, then ironclad dreadnoughts, the sophistication, the cost, the size of the state grew, unfortunately.

And I think it’s, as we’ve seen, our government manages to spend unlimited amounts of money doing stupid things, especially when it tries to go to war.

And we have politicians that completely lose any idea of what something should cost. And I guess maybe that’s why Dr. Arnn wanted me back here, because I’m at least, having come here as an Austrian economics major, in fact, I remember Dr. Ebeling, who’s my professor, and the day I, like right before I graduated, he said, “Mr. Prince, you’ve just come to a school that accepts no federal funding and you’re going to join the largest socialist organization in the world.” I said, “Yes, sir, but it’s the only thing that’s provided, it’s the only part of the military that’s actually specified in the Constitution, Congress shall raise a Navy.”

Government Spending and Private Sector Solutions

But that convergence of trying to bring some kind of market solutions into a, truly a Congress and a military industrial complex that’s run wild, the amount of spending and waste that occurred in Iraq and Afghanistan, as you’re seeing now with the Doge effort, God bless Elon Musk for cutting it down across the board. I hope we have the same opportunity to do something similar in the Pentagon. Yeah, cheer for Elon.

I have such respect for that guy, when he looks at spacecraft, and he said, look, we have to lower the cost of launch to get it to altitude by a thousand fold, and he’s well on his way to doing that.

The Blackwater Story

And as I built a private military contractor, I never really intended to be notorious. I started Blackwater as a way, I had my time in the SEAL teams was cut shorter than I wanted to because my wife got sick at 29 and my dad died all within a few months of each other.

So I built Blackwater as a way to stay connected to the SEAL teams that I liked. I love that job. But as I’m laying it out, and I just looked at, what does the military do? It recruits, vets, equips, trains, deploys, and supports people to do a difficult job in a difficult place.

And we understood it kind of like the Toyota production system, how to manage our costs in a way that big government never was able to do so. And of course the politicians constant answer to us was, “You’re doing something inherently governmental.” And I counter that by saying, I was born in the summer of 1969, Woodstock and Apollo 11.

And if you said that 50 years later after Apollo 11, that the only way the US government gets to the International Space Station is on a Russian rocket or on a contractor rocket, they would have laughed you out of Johnson Space Center. But so Elon Musk has done a great thing in piercing that veil of government inevitability that only government can do this.

AI and Innovation in Modern Warfare

And as we reach an era of AI, where that technical acceleration is really occurring on the bleeding edge of battle in theaters like Ukraine, in Israel, where you just saw it in Syria, and standby, there will be four or five other significant changes in countries that occur this year.

That level of innovation and speed is only going to come from the private sector. It’s not going to come from big government labs. It’s not going to come from, it’s probably not even going to come from DARPA.

It’s going to come from smart people in America operating from their garages with a dream. And I really hope that the Trump team is able to change procurement to allow for the purchase and innovation that the private sector can do, because otherwise, as you just see the, I don’t really fear as much as people get super hyperventilated about China with AI, China with this many missiles, all the rest. It still comes down to individual leadership in the field, at the sergeant level, at the junior officer level.

We have still the very, very finest of those kind of soldiers in the world. And I see units and people from all kinds of places as part of my professional life. We don’t have a monopoly on innovation, but we have a critical mass of it.

American Innovation and Military Capability

And a lot of that still resides in the military. And if the innovation that the private sector can provide that I know it can provide, and as long as DOD opens the, just a little bit, opens the tap of money, redirecting from the nonsense, hyper overpriced programs that they like to spend money on, we can certainly not just catch up, but surpass any capability that we have to worry about with China.

China’s Historical Context

I think China, if you look at China itself over the last, what, two millennia, it’s been one of the largest GDPs on earth, always.

The aberration of the Chinese Communist Party taking over in 49, with the Great Leap Forward killing 50 million people, and then the culture revolution in the late 60s and 70s, killing many, many more, and imprisoning and really jamming up their society. They have turned towards capitalism, but then now they’re turning away from capitalism again with Xi Jinping and the anti-corruption campaign. So they definitely have some issues.

Competing Systems of Governance

And I think it’s appropriate policy for the United States, as we did in the Soviet Union, encouraging people that want to breathe free in China to do so, and to be able to buck the overarching, overarching control, because we really have a competition for governance at this point in the world. Because you either have a Western Republic like the United States, with actual value of individual liberty, choice, free speech, private property, or something where you’re completely subjugated to an all-powerful state, an actual rule of the elites, where you give up pretty much any of your rights to do anything in exchange for some hopeful promise of some kind of economic growth. And I certainly know which one of those I would choose.

And, but just because our forefathers, we stand on the shoulders of giants, have been successful for the last, I don’t know, we’re coming up on 250 years, it’s an amazing time for a kind of a, not a reset, but a refocus. And I think Trump is off to a good start for the first couple of weeks, and I hope that momentum builds as we go towards a year from this July. Think of that, 250 years.

And if we can get back to actually what made America great, which is our private sector, not government, we will continue to advance.

Military Readiness Concerns

So again, I’m not so worried about China militarily. I am worried if we blunder into a dumb, unnecessary war in Taiwan.

The US Navy is not ready to fight tonight. They are plagued by bad leadership, a lot of misguided training policies, and we spent a lot of money, and there’s not nearly the readiness that there should be. A year and a half ago, we lost the ship, the Bonhomme Richard.

It started, a fire started while it was in dry dock, or pier side, in repair in San Diego. It took the Navy, it took the crew an hour and a half to get first water on that fire on a ship, okay, an active warship. The ship burned up at the dock.

Because of incompetence of the crew and the responding fire services. That’s the kind of nonsense, that’s a billion, billion and a half dollar write-off, and that’s a big aircraft carrier. That’s bigger than any aircraft carrier we used in World War II, for example.

Taiwan and China Tensions

So if the Navy runs a traditional playbook, if the Chinese, the Chinese Communist Party, and why do they hate Taiwan so much? Because Taiwan is Han China culture, but on freedom. There’s only 24 million people there, versus 1.3, 1.4 billion, but it is a super irritant because they can’t take that comparison. They’re free over there in Taiwan, not on the mainland.

So the way that the PLA would do it, is they would do a big blockade, they’d surround it, they’ve been exercising that consistently, with no pushback from the US at all, not even in unconventional means to deter them. And if they do that, so what is the Navy going to do? They’re going to respond with aircraft carriers, and like I said, you run a $12 billion aircraft carrier within a range of thousands of precision missiles that the Chinese can fire, that’s going to result in a very bad image of a US Navy aircraft carrier with 5,000 of our citizens on board, smoking or worse.

Historical Parallels and Geopolitical Consequences

And that ties directly into the geopolitical consequences that we would face then, because remember, the British Empire, after they defeated Napoleon at Trafalgar, 1804, ruled the waves for the next century.

And then they got spanked at the Battle of Jutland during World War I, just off the coast of Denmark, and that was the beginning of the end of the British Empire. They lost territory, they lost the pound as a dominant currency, and you would see an unwind in that competition of governance. Is it our system of Western capitalism? Freedom? Look, democracy in a republic is a mess.

It’s messy, it’s imperfect. It does not have the crispness of a dictatorship, of course. But I would take messy and innovation and bottoms-up approach to problem-solving versus top-down dictatorship any day.

But we cannot let ourselves blunder into the stupid things like that, because history shows that can be the beginning of the end. So, you know what? With that, let me take questions, and I can also give you a tour of the world on problem areas that I think will flare up if anybody wants. Thank you, Mr. Prince.

Q&A Session

ERIK PRINCE: We now have time for a Q&A. If you have a question, please make your way to a microphone. Student questions will be given preference.

Who’s up? Send it.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Thank you so much, Dr. Prince, for your talk. My question, I’m also an Austrian economics.

ERIK PRINCE: Hold it close to your mouth. There you go.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Thank you so much for your talk this evening, Doctor.

I’m also an Austrian economics major here, so we can always use more of those. My question is about, can you elaborate a little more on the economics of the privatization of the military industry? You mentioned Elon Musk’s ability to bring down costs of space exploration. How do we do that in the military industry? Is it more of a policy change that we need to see, or is it more of entrepreneurs’ responsibility to make adjustments? And what would those be?

ERIK PRINCE: Sure.

The simple word for that is actual competition, and really opening up the floodgates. When it comes to producing missiles or whatever, you have such a narrow field of vendors that you basically get a duopoly or a monopoly of provider, and so they just say, well, this is how much it costs. I remember the first State Department job for security that we did.

They wanted us to train the protective detail of Columbia. They have issues. And Greece, right before the Olympics.

It was like 2004 or six. And we trained tens of thousands of people. We knew what we were doing.

We put the bid together. And the State Department said, we cannot accept your bid. They said, why? They said, because it’s so low, it’s not deemed credible.

Like, well, we had 35% margin on it. So we doubled it, and they accepted it. That’s the level of insanity, and competition solves that.

Contract to exclusivity, that’s the problem. Like, once a private company takes it over, they can’t target it. So under the Clintons, we went from about 100 major defense contractors and really consolidated down to five super majors.

Lockheed, Northrop, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics. They need to be broken up and to restore a lot of competition, and actually, or even just blow by them and look to the next generation, private, innovative ones, and get them the manufacturing capability to do it. That’s how you actually bring down significant costs.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Thank you very much for speaking. Now, the United States military is currently suffering from an ongoing recruitment crisis, not because America has any shortage of brave young men willing to fight, but because we know that the military, under the current guidance of desk jockeys, has been reduced to little more than a benefits program and adult daycare, but with camouflage on top, which has also been losing wars consistently for quite some time. Now, I’ve been told recently from a reliable source that the United States is quite behind in a significant drone race.

And while we all have great faith in President Trump and Hegseth in bringing honor and efficiency back to our armed forces, we, especially at Hillsdale College, fear that the government, even a well-intentioned and well-led government, may not be up to the task of adjusting to 21st century warfare without the help of the private sector. Would you consider founding a private military academy for those of us who believe that the safety of our nation would be better achieved by teaching young men Klauswitz and drone tactics, rather than white fragility and the poetry of Maya Angelou?

ERIK PRINCE: Well, thank you for that long question slash statement. I, look, I loved Blackwater and the team.

And I had the great honor of employing tens of thousands of the best of Americans. And still to this day, I run into them in airports and some garden spots around the world. And I miss that.

The Private Sector’s Role in Global Stability

And yes, I will tell you, I’m working on a couple of significant projects overseas, which would provide interesting employment for young men, and women sometimes. But yes, I think, and that’s one of the reasons I did not apply actively for a government job, is because I think there’s a lot of ways the private sector can contribute. Look, I think the business of America should be business. And when we lead with a military into all these countries that have melted down and need stability operations, we clearly fail at that.

When you think back to how America was founded, it was founded by three companies: Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, and Jamestown Colonies. Those companies were actually listed on the City of London Exchange, effectively a stock exchange. They hired people like Miles Standish and John Smith, former professional military officers that came and protected the colony and built it up.

And so, and I’ve said with some controversy about bringing back colonialism, to be clear on that, there are millions of people that invade America every year. Why? They’re coming for the American dream. They’re coming for American governance.

I think there’s lots of ways we can use market forces to literally do private cities, private governance on leased land in melted or desolate lands around the world to provide security, good governance, the basic utilities, and the local people will flourish. And that’s a way we can replicate. Because you know what? I would take 10,000 mayors from around American cities, we’ll run 10,000 cities in Africa, better than there.

And so replicating the things we take for granted here, property rights, getting a bank account, title for land, all the things. If you’ve not read The Mystery of Capital and The Other Path by Hernando de Soto, please do so. Really lays out how the basics of why American capitalism works, why you have capital formation that works here, and how to replicate that in other countries.

So yes, I’m working on that.

Q&A Session

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Hi, thank you for being here. Enjoyed your speech. How do we fight communism abroad when so many Americans here are in love with the idea?

ERIK PRINCE: That’s a really good question. Because it’s such an insidious, attractive lie. And to me, it kind of comes down to people thinking versus feeling.

And the emotion of socialism, that everything will be great if only a few people are endowed with all this authority and power over us. It’s this rule of the elites, which appeals to some elites. And it also appeals to a lot of people that don’t want to take responsibility for themselves.

So it’s an insidious lie. I was, I guess, inoculated from that in 1976, when my dad was invited to come to the Soviet Union in East Germany, because they wanted to buy his machine tools. And he didn’t like it.

He didn’t like the surveillance. He didn’t like the whole feel. So he dragged the rest of the family in a Chevy van across Eastern Europe.

I spent my seventh birthday in East Berlin, 1976. And for a seven-year-old to see the guns, and the dogs, and the minefields, and the tank traps all facing in, keeping people in East Germany, pretty obvious to say something’s not great about socialism if you need that level of force to keep people here. So look, that’s on you.

It’s on you to be salt and light amongst your peers, to say, let the data show where does socialism work versus where does good governance work, and compare, obviously, Singapore versus, I don’t know, you name the socialist hellhole. There’s a lot of them.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Thank you for your talk. I was wondering if you could comment on the use of AI in hacking and attacking computer networks in cyber warfare.

ERIK PRINCE: That would be a bit more out of my lane of expertise. I remember when I took my first polygraph. At the end, the polygraph guy said, this thing about you hacking government computer systems, we don’t think you’re telling the truth. And I ripped off the stuff. And I said, listen, if your polygraph is telling you I’m hacking government computer systems, I can barely get my own email.

So I’m going to punt on that one.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Thank you for being here, Mr. Prince. I have two quick questions for you. One, I was listening to a podcast, Caribbean Rhythms, which you appeared on on the way up here. And Caribbean Rhythms, you appeared on that podcast several months ago, prior to the election.

ERIK PRINCE: OK. And I’ve done a lot of them, so I’m sorry if I forget the name.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: No, it’s all right. On there, you described a moment when you met with President Trump prior to 2016, and you advised him to be on the lookout for who you appoint as an advisor, if I recall correctly. And I believe you said in 2019, at a veterans event, he came up to you, and he said that you were right to be on the lookout for who you are appointing. And I guess my question, the first question is, if he were here in this room today, what kind of advice would you give him, given his resounding success so far in his first week or so as president, to have him be on the watch out for, as we know after his first term, who your advisor is matters. And then my second question is, do you have a show or podcast of your own that people can tune into and listen to?

ERIK PRINCE: Yeah, so short answer is, my podcast is called Off Leash, with Erik Prince. So that’s on X, and it’s on YouTube, whatever. Google suppresses it, of course, on YouTube, but you can still find it.

Look, I think President Trump has really taken seriously, because he never really controlled the security apparatus in the first administration, but he definitely has made much better choices now.

And they’ve got a lot of work to do, because there’s just been such a lack of seriousness. If you think about the reform, I mean, when George Marshall took over the US Army in September 1, 1939, like the same time that the Nazis invaded Poland, he started firing colonels and generals, preparing to fight the next war. And we never did any of that for 25 years.

And all these generals, all these failed generals and colonels kept floating to the top, and they’re now populating all these ranks. And you now have, in World War II, we had 14 million people under arms. You now have 1.3 million, so less than 10 times. And we have the same amount of flag officers. In an era of instant video communication, and there should be a flatter, faster organization, we have a very bloated top end, and hopefully that gets a lot lighter very soon.

AI and Modern Warfare

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Hi, Mr. Prince. I was curious if you could go into more detail on what I would call the AI hunter-killer drone, and how it can be programmed to look for and kill a single individual in a crowd.

ERIK PRINCE: Yes, very true, very, very real threat. There’s a company called Clearview, for example, which scrapes billions of images off the web. So if you’ve ever posted any picture in any social media, if you’ve ever tagged in a picture, any kind of online driver’s license roles, anything like that, your image. And so now, with a very small drone, it could launch it and it could fly around this room looking for the face it’s after and drive itself into your forehead with even a few milligrams of powder, clack itself off on your head. That’s the level of threat that we’re coming to.

So again, I don’t care, a great military sniper can take a cold bore shot, the first shot, at 1,000 meters and probably hit his target. But now, any one of you, I can take out and give you 30 minutes of FPV drone instruction, and now you can fly a drone out to 15 kilometers and hit a target. So that’s the nature of, and that’s with a human in the loop.

You put an AI drone pilot on there, of which there’s many different variants right now in early phases, that it’s a real problem. There’s even been a company called Shield AI makes an AI for a fighter pilot, which has fought manned aircraft versus unmanned aircraft. And the unmanned aircraft can vastly exceed normal G limits because it doesn’t have a pilot that has to keep blood in their head.

Well, right, because you get a G limit, at nine Gs, a pilot is really having a hard time staying awake, a robot doesn’t have that problem. So those are also very real issues to contend with.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Thank you so much for coming and speaking with us tonight. 100 years ago, the future of the modern battle space was tanks and truck mounted infantry. And every major power in the world had a man who could see what the future of the battle space was like Patton in the United States, and Charles de Gaulle in France, and Heinz Guderian in Germany, and Gregory Zhukov in the Soviet Union. They could see how this new technology could be applied to the modern battle space to win victories in that battle space. Does the United States have such a man at this time who understands how drones and AI are being utilized in Ukraine and Russia, who can develop a doctrine for our military to be successful in such conflict?

ERIK PRINCE: I’d say there’s probably a colonel or two in the army special forces, because they’re now, they’re doing a drone course as part of every special forces qualification as part of their curriculum, so they get it. And now they’re doing a field deployable kit where you have the rotors, the circuit boards, all the pieces and parts so you can actually make these guys put Frankenstein drones together in the fields and go to work with them. So that level of iteration is coming.

I don’t know where that is in the Navy. I don’t think it exists yet. And definitely not in the Air Force.

Because look, the Air Force hated, the whole reason we have Predator drones, think of it this way, a company called General Atomics licensed the original Predator A from a guy. It was a gasoline engine, an avgas engine. They licensed it first to the CIA, they used it in Bosnia, it worked.

CIA, more of an early adopter, easier procurement. Air Force wanted nothing to do with it. The agency decided to make it armed. That’s why you had some armed Predator drones when 9-11 happened. General Atomics, private ownership, super free market guys, Larry, you should probably hit him up. It’s Lyndon and Neil Blue.

They took all the money they made from Pred A and built Pred B, their own specs. They just like bigger, heavier, stronger, capable. And they made Pred C. Again, until the agency started taking all the glory and space, the Air Force wanted nothing to do with it because the Air Force is an armed airline union.

Look, they’ve become that, and the pilot mafia does not want to give up seats. And that’s the problem. You have to be willing to reinvent yourself or obsolesce yourself to stay relevant.

Combating Low-Cost Drones

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Hello, Mr. Prince, over here. Yep, gotcha. My name is Michael Roop. I’m a history sophomore here. My dad’s a big fan of yours. I know you kind of covered this a little earlier, but what strategies would you recommend the US military adopt to combat those new low-cost drones if our old equipment is obsolete?

ERIK PRINCE: We have to have a better hard kill scenario, a solution, whether that’s air bursting, high rate of fire cannons, lasers, EMPs. The reason I like hard kill air bursting munitions is because battlefields have a lot of fog. We’re in Michigan, for heaven’s sakes. We know there’s fog, rain, clouds. All that stuff is not great for lasers, but an air bursting munition will fire and burst, and you have to find a way.

Look, there’s two things a military officer does. Coordinates information, releases energy. Our information flow has become so voluminous that it’s overwhelming, and they need to do a better job of sifting it. But energy-wise, right? Releasing energy. Drive the ship from here to there, fly that airplane, fire that weapon.

The cost of us delivering energy, putting a warhead on a forehead, is so outrageously expensive, or shooting down a drone, like the Navy trying to shoot down those Houthi missiles, has gone bonkers. Like 1,000-fold higher than it should be. So finding simple, low-cost solutions.

I mean, look, the Ukrainians had to adopt, out of necessity, what are they using? 12-gauge with birdshot. Taking down small drones, and it’s actually not a terrible option. So again, Hillsdale with a great shooting program, it works.

Defense Industry Reform

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Hello, thank you for coming to speak. I just wanted to ask, you mentioned both that innovation comes from individual Americans in their garage with a dream, and then you also talked about how there are like five companies within the defense industry who have kind of monopolized the industry. How would you say that you should break up these companies, and how do you think it would affect the military-industrial complex itself?

ERIK PRINCE: So just like the federal government, like Teddy Roosevelt, did some great antitrust enforcement. They broke up Standard Oil. Or in the 80s, they broke up AT&T. And the sum of the value of those component parts was actually higher than the value of the monolith.

So we’re not talking about trying to destroy shareholder value, but breaking up these companies so that instead of having five companies bid, we have 20 or 25 companies that are available to bid on certain projects. Second, from the purchasing side, if they can spend money on the little guys because the problem is the government procurement people are bureaucrats, and they just want to do the safe and easy thing. And so if they keep spending money, and it’s not their money, they don’t care how much they overspend on X, Y, or Z item they’re buying.

So they just default to the highest cost legacy system. And I guess the other thing that needs to happen is putting the decision-making of what gets purchased as close to the end user that has to use it as possible. Because it’s one thing for bureaucrats sitting in an air-conditioned cubicle in the Pentagon to decide, but it’s a different thing if it’s a general that is literally deploying with his personnel in the field to live with those decisions.

Q&A Session with Erik Prince

AUDIENCE QUESTION: It’s always like the principle of assiduity. Make the decision as close to possible where people are affected by it. Hello, Mr. Prince.

This actually kind of goes along with what you were just talking about. Do you think that with our current system, the U.S. is capable of adopting those cheaper systems that are being developed for anti-drone defense? Or do you think that a definitive change in the structure of the decision-making has to be made before those will be adopted?

ERIK PRINCE: I think there’s a lot of foreign customers that are desperately needing it. Probably even more so than we’ll have a more animated response, necessary response to obtain that difference, versus very aggressive in Washington.

But yes, they can adopt. When Iraq was full-on and they had the rapid equipping force programs, which was kind of a way to completely end-run all the bureaucracy, there was a lot of tech that was adopted into the field very quickly without drama.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: So I think you said something to the effect that if you know where it is, it can be targeted and destroyed. So governments and other apparatus would seem to be pretty stationary. Would it become harder, at least in some contexts, to keep a state together? Or is there some way to defend against things effectively? Or how is that going to affect the future of stability in regions?

ERIK PRINCE: There’s another book called either The Sword or The Shield of Achilles. And it’s about the democratization of strike.

As tech proliferates, if you look at Google Maps today on your smartphone, and you compare it to what the best imagery that was available in 1985, it would have been super level, top secret. And now it’s available on everybody’s phone. That proliferation of tech, whether it’s communications, imagery, weaponry, now precision strike, it changes the nation state. And I’d say it impedes or impairs the nation state’s ability to have absolute control.

And so then having consent of the governed matters a lot. Having a bottoms up government like we have, better. It also speaks to our ability to make life miserable for tyrants because of the ability for small units to punch way above their weight. Stand by tyrannical governments.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Thank you so much for your presentation. Two part question here. First of all, what do you think about the future of the BRICS Alliance under a new Trump administration? And then second of all, you did mention potential flare up points in the next year or two. I’d love to get your thoughts on that as well.

Global Alliances and Potential Conflicts

ERIK PRINCE: BRICS is an attempt to move things away from a dollar-based trade. And look, the US has overused sanctions and disincentivized people from trading in dollars. The stronger the dollar becomes, the better our economy becomes, the less relevant the BRICS become.

An America that is credible in—look, the foreign policy of the United States should be that our friends love us, our rivals respect us, and our enemies fear us. And currently, in the previous administration, our friends were wondering why we were doing self-immolation, and our enemies were laughing at us. And they were constantly carving off another piece.

Foreign policy, credibility and deterrence matters. But there’s a lot of mess to be cleaned up. It is in the interest of the United States.

So for a hundred years, it was a policy goal to keep German industry from combining with Russian resources. And now all this stupid war in Ukraine has done is push all those Russian resources into a submissive role with the Chinese Communist Party and all that industry. And that is bad.

Russia does not have to be our friend, maybe frenemy, but we have far more in common with Russians than we do with Chinese, Indians, or Southeast Asia, culturally long-term. The real opportunity was missed at the end of the Cold War to really embrace Russia and not embarrass them, because it was a great empire. And look, the fact is, they’re the ones that did the heavy lifting in defeating the Nazis.

When you move all those NATO countries right up to Russia’s border, and they look out and say, “There’s more unfriendly militaries on our border than at any time since May of 1941,” it’s an unnecessary provocation. And I would say bad statecraft.

Global Flashpoints

The Russians got chased out of Syria, so they pushed hard into Libya. They’re trying to put a Navy base in Tobruk. And so you’ll see Libya largely start to split because the Turks have put a number of bases in Western Libya.

And then you have Italy, which is the largest energy buyer for much of Europe’s energy needs, gas coming out of Libya. And so that’s going to be a problem. The Sahel continues to be a problem.

There’s a lot of terrorism there. They pushed all the French out. Again, lack of credibility, lack of the big French brother with Americans too, not finishing the jihadis that have been ravaging the place.

And so Russian significant influence in Mali and Burkina. Not as much in Niger yet. We’ve got some things hoping to, in Niger to make that right.

South Africa continues to unwind as a society. And the ANC government, the one positive development was that the Democratic Alliance, a better governance party from the South, from around the Western Cape area, did better in the last election. But the ANC is true to its Marxist, black nationalist roots and wrecking the country in the last election.

They just signed a land seizure bill, which is going to have really bad effects. Taiwan, big problem. Burma, big problem.

Why does Burma matter? The Chinese built a port in Jopio and they’re trying to, they built a pipeline which runs from Jopio right up the old China resupply road from the 1940s, from World War II. They built a gas line that way and it helps make China less vulnerable. And so watch on that one.

And of course, very close to my heart, Venezuela. I’ve been paying attention to Venezuela and the nonsense that the socialists have been doing there for a long time. And I tweeted after Maduro stole the election end of this last July.

I mean, the opposition won the election clearly 70 to 30. The bad guys lost by 40 points and they completely ignored the results. And I tweeted, “If Biden and Harris really want to support democracy in Venezuela, they should up the bounty on Maduro because there was already a $15 million bounty on him for drug trafficking.”

I said, “Raise it to 100 million, sit back and watch the magic happen.” And they don’t even need to use US taxpayer money. They can use frozen money that they have from PDVSA, the national oil company.

We cannot let them get away with it because Venezuelan money, it is a narco state. There are 34 full-on meth processing facilities in the country, major transshipment spot and production spot for fentanyl, which last year, headline number is 109,000, real number is about 400,000 Americans. As much as we lost in all of World War II, every year from fentanyl, a lot of it coming out of Venezuela.

And that socialist money is corrupting and tipping over a lot of other governments. In Colombia now, you have Petro who is a communist. He was literally part of M19 communist movement, one of the students that took over their justice ministry back in the 80s.

He’s a really bad guy, at risk in Peru and Chile. There’s an election February 9th in Ecuador. We cannot let the socialist rot cascade across Latin America.

MODERATOR: Please join me in thanking Mr. Prince. Thank you so much for your insights.

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