TRANSCRIPT: The Future of Dynamic Warfare: Erik Prince

And I left after three semesters, and I rolled right into Hillsdale. Had an excellent experience here, both on and off campus. I joined the fire department while I was here, and I would say I learned more about leadership there doing that than I did in a very artificial learning lab that the Naval Academy attempted to do. And from there, I applied.

I got married. Finished my last year at Hillsdale. Rolled into Officer Candidate School. Joined the Navy. Spent a few years in the SEAL teams.

Transition to Business

ERIK PRINCE: And on the family business, it was policy that you don’t come and work in the family business, you have to go do something else first. I really had no interest in it anyway. And so I was a SEAL. I enjoyed it. Was pretty good at it.

And then my father died, and my wife got cancer within a few months of each other, so I got out. And to kind of help out sort out the family business, and that’s what led me to start Blackwater, which was a private training facility. It’s effectively a, you know, the SEAL teams had used private facilities, really since the 1970s. If you’re a special operations unit, you go to a big government base. It’s very bureaucratic, not so tailored to the unique needs of a special operations unit.

So we built something almost like a country club, but for special operations units, and it worked.

Blackwater and Business Evolution

ERIK PRINCE: So and then when, you know, terrible shooting like the Columbine shooting in Colorado, and then the USS Cole was blown up in 2000, and we adapted and grew and served our customers. And so at the same time, I’m doing Blackwater. The original business my dad started, which made die cast machines, was taken through a lean transformation kind of based on the Toyota production system because it was a business that never really made much money. It just kind of survived. So we leaned it out, got better at what we did.

And that’s where I really learned about continuous flow and Six Sigma and all those kind of manufacturing things. And I thought, you know, what does a military do? It recruits, vets, equips, trains, deploys, and supports people to do a thing.

Well, that’s kind of how we laid out Blackwater because we had the training piece down. But then as 9/11 happened, we really built a machine that could process people to go do a difficult job in a difficult dangerous place. And that’s what we did, and that business grew very large. We had very good margins because we were extremely tight on costs and efficiency, unlike typical government contractors and definitely unlike the military. And, yeah, that’s a whole another story.

Churchill and Military Strategy

LARRY P. ARNN: Yeah. That’s we have. Well, we I’m hoping by the time we’re done, people are going to know what and how you think because you have struck a chord with me over the years. I knew you were a graduate. I haven’t really ever talked to you a long time except once. But, my opinion is you figured some big things out. We were talking about Churchill before we started this, and there’s an impression in America. Churchill is probably more popular in America than he is in England, and he’s more popular with conservatives. And he’s popular with conservatives who like war.

And every time we get into war, we trot out his busts, and we think war is good. He did not think that. And also, he thought it’s such a trial. It’s, you know, it’s life or death. And apart from the fact that it takes from the real purposes of life, which are here at home, there’s also the fact that if you’re wasteful when you do it, you’ll be beaten because if the other guy’s not wasteful.

It’s ultimate economic contest as well.

Taiwan Defense Strategy

LARRY P. ARNN: So I’ll ask you this first. I heard a podcast. It led me to tell everybody I know, which is some people, you should put that guy in the defense department. You talked about the defense of Taiwan. Explain your views about that. What should be done there?

ERIK PRINCE: I think the best way to deter conflict on Taiwan is for them to build a home guard. Because in an era of precision weapons where the Chinese, the PLA, can have pre-registered dozens of weapons at every known valuable location that Taiwan might have, meaning any aircraft, submarine, base, command bunker. So all those known locations are going to get erased in the opening moments of a conflict. What the PLA, what the Chinese Communist Party can’t compete for is national will.

And if you think about the American colonists in 1775, you had 30% that were pro-crown loyalists, 40% in the middle that didn’t really care. They’re just trying to survive, and 30% that were pro-liberty. Ten percent of the 30% or 3% actually took up arms against, at that point, the most powerful military in the world. And they won. And so if you because there was will, they knew the terrain, they could figure out the basic means to defend themselves, and they ended up buying or smuggling in arms from abroad to get their job done.

In the case of Taiwan, the PLA, if they’re going to move on them, they’re going to put a big embargo. They’re going to literally surround the country and try to lock it down. But if China’s going to move, they have to go quickly. They have to have this end quickly because China imports about 90% of their hydrocarbons and a significant amount of their food, and it’s a very trade-based economy. So they can’t go with a multi-year campaign like Russia has against a chunk of Ukraine. They have to move quickly.

And so they what they can’t calculate for, if you take 3% of the Taiwanese population, I think it’s like 720,000 people. That’s a lot. Their military is largely very weak, very, let’s say, a lot of soy boys. Not all, but enough. But if you have people that can step out of their homes and gather weapons from a fire station, police station, civil defense shelter, the complexity and difficulty of trying to occupy a land where there’s armed people that know what they’re doing, that have maybe four to six weeks of partisan training, makes conquering the island completely exceedingly difficult because you have urban terrain and you have massive jungle, that they can hide out and operate in.

The smartest thing, about the only smart thing Zelenskyy’s done in the Ukraine fight was literally when the Russians invaded, he opened the national armories. And people came and got weapons, RPGs, anti-tank missiles to fight, and that’s actually what stopped the initial Russian advance.

And so entrusting a percent of your population that is trained and motivated in Taiwan is the best way and also the cheapest way.

LARRY P. ARNN: And they’re not doing that?

ERIK PRINCE: No, sir.

LARRY P. ARNN: Are we encouraging or likely to encourage them to do that?

ERIK PRINCE: I think there’s been an encouragement. Again, that’s also part of the problem of the military-industrial complex that the big lobbyists that talk to the generals want to sell big-ticket weapon systems with, thinking that some golden arrow is going to solve the problem. No. It’s lots of lots of simple weapons in the hands of people that are motivated and willing to defend their terrain and turn every intersection, every village into another complex target that must be taken for the PLA.

Military Strategy and Efficiency

LARRY P. ARNN: So you draw an example from the American Revolution. If you undertake the classical study of politics, which you’ve done some here, you learn that there are kinds of regimes and that the kinds that are liberal that want people to live their own lives and make their own livings and innovate as they please, that it’s very sensitive to have a big huge state and war is all-consuming. And so what I noticed about you some years ago, because you’re a warrior, a SEAL. We should talk about that before we’re done. That’s a very hard kind of warrior to be. But you think, we have to do this efficiently, and it’s partly for the sake of the preservation of the liberal character of the society.

And so the throw money at it solution is bad. Truly unsustainable in every way.

ERIK PRINCE: Yeah. And it will end up despotizing us.

Churchill’s Approach to Special Operations

ERIK PRINCE: We talked about Churchill a little bit. He was always looking for the cheapest way. I’d say one of the best things, and being from a special operations background, Churchill was the main advocate for the SOE, the special operations executive. He said set Europe ablaze. He wanted small teams to do unconventional warfare things to attack the enemy anywhere and everywhere. So the enemy had to defend everywhere, and he wanted to do very, and yes. And but to do that, in his defense, you also have to be willing to take risks, and you have to almost be like a wildcatter drilling oil wells. Sometimes you hit it, sometimes you don’t. So there is some spectacular failures, but also some amazing success.

And, you know, the sad thing is, Churchill was so waylaid over the Dardanelles. Right? The Gallipoli campaign in Turkey. And that’s such a great example. Right? Because they achieved surprise. The UK allied forces managed to get to the beach, and the Highlands, where they had to get to, were unoccupied. But the indecisive officers down at the beach were waiting until they had all their people together instead of saying, go up and take that hill right now before the enemy can implant machine guns there. It would have saved I mean, it was a brilliant campaign because you wanted to choke off Turkey and keep them from supporting the axis. But literally, it was a sad example of that wrong decision made at the bleeding edge of battle. If the guy had made a decisive follow me, let’s go and get this done right now instead of waiting for the perfect plan executed never. Even his career would have been different.

The Gallipoli Campaign

LARRY P. ARNN: It’s a wonderful thing you know that because that’s a favorite story of mine because there is a photograph in the official biography of Churchill of the ship that the first soldiers arrived at the Gallipoli Peninsula. And we know from the records of the thing that he sent scouts up there. And he said and he came back down and said, we better go up there. And the soldiers are diving in the water off the ship and sunning on the beach, waiting a day.

And to go up there. And the man who arrived after a forced march at the top with the Germans was named Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. And, you know, one thing about that guy is, Western nations fought that guy many times. They always lost.

Importance of Individual Valor and Leadership

ERIK PRINCE: Yeah. You know, I think it’s something people don’t even appreciate about, and as we talk about Pentagon reform right now, individual valor, decisiveness of leaders really matters. Because if you think about this distillate campaign, in World War II, Patton literally went ashore as early as humanly possible. He goes ashore. He’s pressing on and literally miraculously stops because he sees a ranger banner hanging from a house off the side of the road. He stops. That was the last point of American lines. And sure enough, just as a massive attack from a German armored unit comes and Patton, as a three-star general, is hanging mortars in a gunfight, hanging mortar rounds in a tube, fighting back, preventing a breakthrough of German armor forces to split the American advance.

Leadership and Military Strategy

ERIK PRINCE: Patton’s leadership style from the front driving, expecting excellence, but also not expecting anything from anyone that he wouldn’t be willing to do himself. I have great respect for Churchill because he appreciated an unconventional warfare approach. I mean, his stalwart support of founding the SAS. It’s a fantastic series on TV right now called “Rogue Heroes.”

On founding the SAS because the Brits are getting their butts kicked. Right? Montgomery is pressing to drive them. If they could take the Suez Canal, Britain loses because they can’t get resources and personnel from India anymore. And, you know, why do people rob banks? It’s where the money is. You want to go attack you want to kill airplanes? Go to where the airfields are.

So the SAS, first by trying by parachute, disaster, but they persisted by vehicle, and they destroyed more aircraft than the entire British Air Force. And they destroyed them on the ground. And it was absolutely Churchill believed so much in what they’re doing. He sent his own son to operate with them to actually infiltrate Tobruk. See, I’m sorry, Benghazi.

LARRY P. ARNN: I mentioned that nerdy political philosophy word regime, comes from the Latin. It means the way of a people. Their whole life.

The Contest with China

LARRY P. ARNN: So we’re in a contest with China. I’ve heard you say that the Communist Party of China is our chief enemy in danger, and they outnumber us, what, three and a half for four to one. How do we compete with them?

ERIK PRINCE: I like those odds. It’s really good. Look. It is a true conflict of governance models. Do you believe in individual liberty, freedom, and, yes, an imperfect democracy, republic, messiness? Or do you believe in a centralized state with literally a rule of elites of a Politburo standing committee and one communist dictator with all power over every aspect of your life? I choose liberty, however messy it might be.

But, yeah, it’s, in a way that the conflict we had with the Soviet Union, Soviet Union was never as strong economically as China has been because I would say the globalists in the early nineties said if we make China rich, it’ll become like us. And it did not make them rich indeed, and it hollowed out an enormous amount of manufacturing from America, but it actually reinforced all their worst communist tendencies.

LARRY P. ARNN: You know, I have a volunteer, so I have a little theory about that. I think a lot of what they did, they learned from us because there’s two models operating in America today, and one is top down and the other is bottom up. And the top down one comes from the progressives. And what they said was we have to manage the society.

ERIK PRINCE: Yeah. It’s the same Keynesian socialism central planning.

LARRY P. ARNN: Exactly. Bring the tools of science to bear on human organization. Elites. The point is that I think that’s what the Chinese are just the American left, you know, with more fangs. And they did sort of work out a theory.

When I was back in Claremont, we had an Asia study center. There’s a guy named Steve Mosher, who’s a great expert on China. And he wrote an article once, and he said that, what this next generation of guys after Deng Xiaoping, what they are is a bunch of engineers, and they’re going to engineer the society. And they want it to produce, and so they’ll try to modulate to make it free enough and not free. And, that’s so their grand experiment I mean, they’re ahead of us in military equipment now. Is that right?

ERIK PRINCE: They have a significantly better industrial base than we do because we literally laid that out for them to build it out. I would say politically, they went from Deng Xiaoping. Right? So after Mao dies, Deng Xiaoping is like, well, enough of this cultural revolution stuff because he was even arrested under that. And he turns to Singapore to say, we want socialism with Chinese characteristics. And they really open up the innovation sector of the economy, and it starts running hot and wild and fast, fast growth.

And then, Xi Jinping is elected. And with the anti-corruption campaigns, he really starts crushing all his opposition. I didn’t realize this, but there’s actually three factions of the communist party. Right? There’s the princelings, of which Xi is. There’s the Shanghai faction, and there’s the communist youth league. He has smashed the other two completely under his anti-corruption campaign. And they’ve really come after the big innovators as well.

Right? When they take a guy like Jack Ma, who’s really developed something almost equivalent of Facebook and Amazon all in one with Alibaba, and they disappear him from society. And he reappears months later lecturing at a kindergarten, and the Chinese press says he has “embraced supervision.” It’s really Orwellian.

So the Chinese economy is not doing great because of that, crushing of the entrepreneurial class. Militarily, they’ve learned to replicate. Yes. They can produce lots of weapon systems at low cost. The question is, can they command and control it? They’ve built a hell of a shipbuilding industry. They produce, I think, twenty times, thirty times the ship tonnage that we do per year. So, yeah, there’s a lot of catching up and innovating that we have to do.

LARRY P. ARNN: So they just had this breakthrough in AI. Can we beat them in AI? They produce a lot more engineers than we do.

ERIK PRINCE: They do produce a lot of engineers, but I would say the Western society approach to failure is healthier than theirs is. I have friends whose fathers have been managing car plants in China for decades. And they will take one Western engineer, and it will take four or five to eight Chinese engineers because a Western guy will be trained to multitask and to bob and weave to problem solve versus a very rote memory approach that is kind of reinforced in the Chinese system. Now I’m not saying that’s the case in all, but that’s at least what they’ve seen in those industries.

The western way of being able to embrace failure and learn from it look at what Elon Musk has done in terms of he said, “hey. I want to get people to Mars. We have to lower the cost of space launch a thousand fold from what it is now.” And, yeah, they engineered it, but he was also really willing to fail a lot along the way and learn from the failure and figure it out.

That is so emblematic of what actually made America great when you think about the early what became our oligarchs, the people that figured out rail lines or steamships or an entire hydrocarbon industry. They just figured it out and innovated. And we’re willing to take risks and willing to fail along the way.

Innovation and American Ingenuity

LARRY P. ARNN: I bet you know Mister Musk pretty well.

ERIK PRINCE: I’ve met him twice. Met him twice. I spent an hour with him one time.

LARRY P. ARNN: I’ve gone wild for him because he’s saving America right now in my opinion. And I purchased a Cybertruck. I saw it sitting outside. It’s, you know, it’s a weird looking thing. My wife doesn’t like it, but, I think it looks kind of like a tank. What it really is is a robot that you can ride in. It’s really cool. And it’s the second new car I’ve ever bought in my life. I’m not even interested in cars, but I like that thing. And I like it that he’s saving America.

His favorite thing, and it’s what you’re talking about, he has this algorithm for running things, which is cycle faster, get rid of rules, get rid of processes, get rid of parts, get bunch of stuff. But the last one is the only rules are the rules of physics.

ERIK PRINCE: Right.

LARRY P. ARNN: So he’s running an open world. Everybody works really hard. Everybody coordinates. Everybody’s thinking, and they figure stuff out. And that’s do you think we have do we have the time? Can we catch them?

ERIK PRINCE: Sure. Absolutely. Yeah. China will roll out a new fighter airplane that they’ve developed that’s supposed to be better than what ours is. I’m not buying that yet. Right? Start worrying when China makes better commercial aircraft than anything in the West. The fact is, they have tried to make commercial aircraft, and they can’t even get Chinese airlines to buy their own commercial aircraft because they have real quality problems. So I think that applies in the military space as well.

LARRY P. ARNN: That’s good. So we’re not despairing. It’s no time to sit around and to be delinquent in reforming ourselves. We have a lot of cleanup to do in the Pentagon. There is a massive culling of bad leadership, of waste, of just stupidity.

ERIK PRINCE: The Pentagon is like an obese triathlete trying to compete. It needs to shed a lot of weight.

LARRY P. ARNN: Well, it’s become a top down society, and it’s not the way. When you look at military history, the yeah. Some generals can make great decisions, but it’s ultimately wars are won, battles are won by sergeants and staff officers at the bleeding edge.

Churchill’s Perspective on War

LARRY P. ARNN: You think that will persist? I looked up a quote. I have studied you up for some years now, and I’m inspired by you. Churchill published an essay called in 1931 called “Shall We All Commit Suicide?” He’s worried about weapons. He’s generally worried, by the way, that the things we invent may become so powerful that they overwhelm us, and war is one place where that might happen. That’s a theme of his, all his life. He’s talking about these modern weapons, which he helped to produce as minister of munitions at the end of the first world war.

He writes: “It might have been hoped that the electromagnetic waves would, in certain scales, be capable of detonating explosives of all kinds from a great distance. Were such a process discovered in time to become common property, war, in important respects, would return again to the crude but healthy limits of the barbarous ages. The sword, the spear, the bludgeon, and above all, the fighting man would regain and abound their old sovereignty.” Ain’t that a lovely thought?

ERIK PRINCE: I guess yeah. Look. It’s a guy that, I think he was part of the charge at Omdurman.

LARRY P. ARNN: He was.

ERIK PRINCE: And taken prisoner in the Boer War and escaped. And so he definitely saw a conflict up close in, in the oldest, you know, I guess, nostalgia for it.

LARRY P. ARNN: In both places, those two places you named, he was illegally there. He, he was, you know, he was a force of nature. You yourself are like that, by the way. He joins the cavalry. His father’s disappointed in him a lot. I think your father was not. But, and he starts writing articles and he’s a second lieutenant and he becomes the most read author on three wars.

ERIK PRINCE: Wow.

LARRY P. ARNN: And he’s criticizing the generals. So they didn’t like it. And, so he gets he published the best selling book about fighting in Afghanistan. If you read that book, it will make you cautious about going to build democracy in Iraq in Afghanistan.

ERIK PRINCE: Yeah.

LARRY P. ARNN: And, but so the prime minister of the country and the prince of Wales, the heir to the throne, invite him to come in and talk about the book. And he goes in and talks to him, and they at the end, it’s predictable. They say, “anything we can do for you, young man?” And he says, “I want to go fight in the Sudan.” And the prime minister and the heir of the throne asked the commander, Lord Kitchener, “can he go?” And Kitchener says, “no. I won’t have him.” And so Churchill just went anyway as he could.

ERIK PRINCE: That’s the correct answer.

LARRY P. ARNN: That’s why he was there. And everybody else was you know, there are famous photographs. So this is a fancy hotel now, but what was the war office back then in Whitehall, right on the middle of everything? There anytime there’s an outbreak of war, there are historic photographs of British officers, young officers, camped outside hoping to get a hold of a general so they could get posted and get their career going.

ERIK PRINCE: Right.

Churchill’s Legacy and Military Innovation

LARRY P. ARNN: Yep. See some fighting. He didn’t do that. He just took off and went there. He eventually, of course, came in command of the war office.

ERIK PRINCE: David Sterling, the founder of the SAS, literally broke into British headquarters in Egypt because he needed permission, and he found a way to make it happen.

Teaching Navy SEALs

LARRY P. ARNN: Yeah. So I’m a, before I came here, I didn’t do very much teaching, but I did every year for five or six years, go teach a three-week course at the naval postgraduate school. And there was some program where you could start out as a seaman and become an admiral, but you needed a bachelor’s degree. And they didn’t have anybody there who could read this English. They were all engineers. And so they get me to come up and teach this course. Almost everybody was a Navy SEAL, and it was a hoot.

They were first of all, they’re at my impression, they’re all killers, you know, And they’re all quiet, and they’re all married to shy, pregnant women. And I would take them out to dinner, and I just love those guys. I would have to interrupt class sometimes and say, “now, you guys are awesome, and I know you can kill me, but please don’t. But there’s one thing I have to sort of set down here as a practice. A question in class is not the same thing as an order.”

You have to speculate. And they were smart. You know? They’d all pass some examination. And, you know, the SEALs are a small part. Very small. And but I, you know, 80% of the students I had over four, five, or six years were Navy SEALs. And they had taken a competitive exam, and they’re going to be an officer.

So anyway, the SEALs. So the SEALs are hell. Right? It’s hard. It’s a hard program. It’s not for everybody, and it makes the training definitely makes you reach deep down inside yourself and ask if you really want to be here. A lot wash out.

ERIK PRINCE: Yes, sir.

LARRY P. ARNN: Did you almost?

ERIK PRINCE: No. Let’s say the closest I came in, third phase, which is the kind of the land warfare phase, I had an injury. I fell off the top of the Slide for Life, which is an obstacle course. It’s about thirty feet. And I landed on sand, and I went up in the hospital for a couple days, but I was okay. I was back in training the next week.

LARRY P. ARNN: I got closer to one of them, and I asked him that question, did you almost wash out? And he said, well, the reason I didn’t, he said, was at various times, I would still remind myself, this is still America. They can’t actually kill me.

ERIK PRINCE: Well, they’re not going to try.

LARRY P. ARNN: Yeah. But he thought they were going to sometimes.

ERIK PRINCE: Well, thank you for that service, by the way. Because that’s fun. Are you kidding me? You get paid to do a job like that, work with guys like that. It was a good program.

The Ukraine Conflict

LARRY P. ARNN: Yeah. That’s wonderful. I want to talk about Ukraine a bit. You seem to know a lot about that. And what’s going on there? What should go on there? What do you think about it?

ERIK PRINCE: I think President Trump is right in his instincts to bring that war to a close. There’s about a zero percent chance the Ukrainians are going to take all their land back. They should have made a deal a year and a half ago already. I think they’re at a war of attrition right now. They’re back to literally World War I style trench warfare style tactics, but also with the addition of precision drones, precision rockets to make it an even more lethal place for infantrymen to try to survive.

The Russians are hell-bent on claiming Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and I think Mariupol, right, which are traditional Russian language areas. Of course, they already have Crimea. They’re not giving that up. And as I think an imperfect peace is better than a sparkly war. And in a war of attrition, math still matters. Russia has a lot more people and a lot more munitions at a much lower cost than the Ukrainians can generate in terms of people. And the Western European and American defense industry is vastly behind and vastly too expensive to really be relevant.

I think it should be a stark wake-up call for America that our weapons are not doing that well there. They’re not in super high demand. Some of the stuff might work for a month or two, but then Russian electronic warfare figures out a way to jam it, the navigation, the command link, or whatever to make it useless.

And that means that, and the idiots, politicians that say, “oh, we’re degrading the Russian army and we’re destroying all this equipment.” No. The Russian army is significantly better, more lethal now than they were when they started. If you shot at the Russians when they go in, that was February 2022. If you shot the Russians then, it might take them an hour, hour and a half to shoot back with artillery. Now, it’s more like two or three minutes. So their cycle time of communication, of finding where the fire is coming from, communicating that to a battery with accurate positions to shoot back on, yeah, it’s they’ve gotten a lot smarter.

LARRY P. ARNN: Can anybody find this stuff out?

ERIK PRINCE: A lot of it is open source. The Royal United Services Institute does a pretty good job of analyzing all of this stuff. I have a lot of relationships in weird places that I talk to people and get first-hand accounts. So but, yeah, it’s, the US military has not learned the lessons from there.

The acceleration, the nature of warfare has changed tremendously from the application of drone warfare and precision warfare across that battlespace in a way that, it is such a democratization of precision strike. It’s as stark a happening as Genghis Khan using stirrups on horses.

Challenges in Modern Warfare

LARRY P. ARNN: Is it true that we can’t protect our aircraft carriers?

ERIK PRINCE: Well, the Houthis, right, the Iranian proxy in Yemen have been firing lots of missiles, ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, kamikaze drones at ships. And the navy says they’ve shot down, they’ve used a billion dollars worth of US missiles shooting that stuff down, which is really bad math because you’re using not one, but two one-million-dollar missiles to shoot down a twenty to fifty thousand dollar drone.

But they said they’ve shut down a billion dollars or they used a billion dollars to do that. It’s really five billion because if they carry, if the inventory cost is from the nineties when they bought that missile, to replace it, it’s going to be five times the cost. Any aircraft carrier, anything that could be located now can be targeted by dozens and dozens of precision weapons. So then again, it’s just a matter of math. If the US Navy fights, it has to fight a war to, in some way, defend Taiwan, and you drive an aircraft carrier within range of all those missile batteries, they can keep shooting missiles until we run out of missiles to shoot them down, and it becomes a real problem.

Because it’s cheap for them to build missiles. The Chinese have done that very well. Our missiles are eight to ten times as costly, and they only have so many of them. Can’t seem to build more at any speed.

LARRY P. ARNN: There are, I was just talking to a senior executive about this. They said they need to pivot back to an automotive mentality away from a government defense contractor mentality. They need to read the book, “Freedom’s Forge” about how the American industry pivoted and really helped win World War II. You know, you go to an automotive company or automotive supplier, they understand a complex assembly in volume, and they’re expected to lower cost every year, not raise cost. And so I think there’s plenty of automotive production know-how and capacity that can make great weapons at a more and more affordable cost.

The Future of US Defense Strategy

LARRY P. ARNN: What does this mean for the strategy of the United States? The modern United States, which maybe begins at the First World War, is interested in power projection, and that’s the navy and the air force and some soldiers sometimes. But if those big aircraft carriers that carry all those planes are not safe and they’re very expensive and they can be killed by something cheaper, what does that imply for the future of our defense and foreign policy?

ERIK PRINCE: That submarines become even more important. Dispersed air power, dispersed combat power, combat projection power into submersible, semi-submersible, or other vessels that are harder to kill.

You know, oddly enough, I remember when Reagan decided to deploy two battleships. He really took them out of the storage closet and brought them back to full combat duty in the eighties. One of the oddities was that they were largely impervious to modern missiles because they had been built to withstand fifteen and sixteen-inch gun hits. And so, any of these cruise missiles, any of these drones would literally bounce off a battleship. Even a wake displacement torpedo, which is designed to remove the water from below a ship so the keel breaks, the keel on the Iowa class battleship was so strong, it wouldn’t have mattered.

LARRY P. ARNN: So maybe you go back to a…

ERIK PRINCE: Some of those are still around. They’re still in storage.

LARRY P. ARNN: Yes. So that’s a lot of steel to try to rust away.

ERIK PRINCE: Yeah. It’s amazing.

Domestic Politics and Government Reform

LARRY P. ARNN: Talk about domestic politics a little bit. So we’ve got the Doge, Department of Government, and the Miracle Boy, Elon Musk. How important is that?

ERIK PRINCE: Extremely important. It’s literally the first time anyone has ever gone through the federal budget and started to cut out the insanity. Our elected politicians, the appropriators, have done an absolutely atrocious job. They’ve never ever had to make a disciplined adult choice to maybe spend less or to wipe out programs that were ineffective or malign to what our national intent is. Everything just kept getting funded. Musk is the first one, and good on Trump for giving him the leeway to do that to say, we’re going to clean this up and then go.

I think they’re going to take a trillion dollars of spending out, four billion a day or so. It’s amazing.

LARRY P. ARNN: I heard, there’s a very interesting phenomenon going on that just charmed me. There’s that guy, and I can’t say his name, Chamath Palihapitiya, I think, is his name. And he’s a buddy of Musk, an investor in Tesla, a rich guy.

ERIK PRINCE: And Andreessen. Mark Andreessen.

LARRY P. ARNN: Yep. And then four other guys that I’ve… David Sacks is one of them. And it looks to me like those guys are figuring out the world. They talk about civilization. They talk about family. They talk about freedom. They talk about and all that’s connected to their experience of entrepreneurship where they made a gazillion dollars, and now they can see what thwarts that. Is there a movement underway to repair the country, do you think?

ERIK PRINCE: I think we had an opportunity to prevent the country from literally going over the cliff last fall, and that worked. And now the question is how many, it’s a race. How quickly can those reforms be enacted so that the average voter says, “you’re right. I agree with that. This is better.”

And hopefully, that results in a win in the midterm and not a diminution of power of the ability to keep doing reforms like that. Because, look, the swamp wants to be the swamp. All those people want to have the same amount of ridiculous money flow going everywhere with no accountability. And, hopefully, the adults can reign this spending in and choke it off. We need an operation thalidomide, literally, like, cut off all the vasculature for this horrifically wasteful government in every way.

It’s not a guns or butter decision. It’s guns and butter. Everything needs to spend less. The Pentagon should take a twenty to thirty percent haircut, and it would be a better, more… and I told Pete Hegseth, we need to focus on lethality and merit at the Pentagon. That’s it.

Military Strategy and Reform

LARRY P. ARNN: Lethality and merit. All the other stuff is nonsense. I’m very happy Musk is providing that much mental capacity to fix the government. I knew Don Rumsfeld, privileged to know him for a long time. He was a donor to our college, and he had a rule, one of Rumsfeld’s rules. And it’s just like Elon Musk the way he runs his many businesses, push authority out and down.

ERIK PRINCE: Always saying that.

LARRY P. ARNN: And it looks to me like that would be, you know, the genius of the American military is what you said. Right? Americans grow up used to competing and cooperating with each other freely. And they get in a war setting, and they’re pretty good at that. And rules is the opposite of that.

ERIK PRINCE: Yes. Let’s make a procedure. Everything’s this way. It’s become almost a religious embrace of proceduralism that’s been enabled by too many layers of radios and surveillance. Right? You have these joint operation centers where the general can have five different drone feeds going at the same time, and they’re trying to make the call from a thousand miles away without being on the bleeding edge of reality. Disperse that trust, the authority and know-how to that capable sergeant or junior officer on the ground to get their job done. Of course, support them if they need it, but don’t second guess them on everything.

The Afghanistan War

ERIK PRINCE: But that’s literally that’s the Iraq and Afghanistan story is a perfect example. So when after 9/11 happened, you had the Pentagon, the most expensive military in the world whose headquarters was attacked and still smoldering. They show up at Camp David right after 9/11. So there’s a national security cabinet meeting.

The Pentagon said we recommend bombs, missile strikes on a few targets, and we’re going to wait until the following April, and we’re going to do a 45,000 man mechanized invasion via Pakistan up into Afghanistan. That’s the best they came with while their headquarters was still smoldering. It was the agency, CIA said, “give us the authorities a little bit of money, and in three weeks, the flies will be walking on the eyeballs of our enemies.” They took the unconventional warfare approach, a hundred staff and agency officers that could call in air power, and that truly made the Taliban run for their lives because they were being hunted aggressively.

The cycle of find, fix, and finish was minutes or seconds. And then by the following spring, when Bagram Air Force Base became a saluting zone, you had to shave your big man beard and have and clean, starched khaki uniform. The targeting cycle went from minutes or seconds to weeks, months, or never. And we bureaucratized hunting the enemy, and nothing happened. And we did that for the next nineteen and a half years and not one of those senior officers called bull on it to say, “hey, guys. This is not working. I have been entrusted as the commander here to finish this. I am unable to with all this ridiculous amount of red tape.” Not one of them did it. And that’s we went through, I think, nineteen different rotations of senior officers in the twenty, twenty-one years who were there.

That’s it’s to me, it’s disgusting. It is a true grotesque waste of money and especially of lives.

Churchill’s Military Philosophy

LARRY P. ARNN: You see, this thinking, this, one of my favorite quotes from the great man Churchill. “Wars are won by a combination of slaughter and maneuver. The greater the general, the more he contributes in maneuver and the less he demands in slaughter.” He says, “the greatest commanders leave their enemies puzzled as well as beaten.”

ERIK PRINCE: Correct. There’s a fantastic book called “The Psychology of Military Incompetence,” and it’s written by a British army psychologist, and it catalogs five horrific British failures. The surrender of Singapore, Baghdad, of course, the Battle of the Somme. And it goes back and it kind of looks into their childhood of how they were raised, how they studied, what they and it’s there’s a lot of common themes of really, really failed generals.

LARRY P. ARNN: Yeah. That, Churchill’s career is in 1901, Churchill gave his first big speech in parliament, and they wanted they brought in South Africa. He had distinguished himself there, and it didn’t go on very well. Had a lot of trouble with South Africans.

ERIK PRINCE: They were a very dispersed, innovative, stubborn. Right? Literally the guys that developed the word commando. Hard to beat.

LARRY P. ARNN: Now that I think of it, your father may have been related to some of those people.

ERIK PRINCE: I would imagine we were. Probably were.

LARRY P. ARNN: It, so their proposal and Churchill comes back a war hero. He’s that’s how he got elected to parliament. He tried twice before, but this time he got captured by the Boers and he got away. He became like a success story. And so their reaction to the war is to double the size of the British army. And his first big speech in parliament is a protest against that.

And he says, we need the navy. It’s very happy that we have the navy. It’s very we’ve developed our free institutions because the navy is primary, not very good for oppressing people at home. It’s cheaper. Money must fructify in the pockets of the people. And then he says, there’s a warning in the middle, and there’s a warning about World War I. Because he’d been at the Battle of Omdurman where they used machine guns and gunboats to mow down…

ERIK PRINCE: The Maxim machine gun against the Mahdi armies.

LARRY P. ARNN: That’s right. And they you know, the Mahdi and he in his account of that in the river war, he calls the dervish, they were called. The dervish soldiers…

ERIK PRINCE: Yep.

LARRY P. ARNN: He called them brave, and he doesn’t call the British brave at any point for that part of the battle. He says that their work was tedious. He said they did remain interested in the work, he writes.

ERIK PRINCE: Religious embrace of proceduralism.

LARRY P. ARNN: And so the point was, he warns, he says, you got no idea when two armies like that one that we had at Omdurman and another one like it meet. You got no idea what that’s going to be like, and we’ll have to put the whole nation into such a war. And so he’s warning about World War I.

The Decline of Naval Supremacy

ERIK PRINCE: Well, since you brought up the British Navy, you know, after, was it 1804 or 5, they defeated Napoleon’s army at Trafalgar, right, off of Spain. And really for the next hundred years, Britain ruled the waves globally. And I would say the British Navy got kind of fat and woke, and they lost focus. And rising power Germany spanks them at the Battle of Jutland. It was not in any way a decisive British victory.

They lost a lot. And I would say that was probably the pivot point of the beginning of the end of the British Empire because it took away the inevitability of British naval supremacy. And I worry about the same kind of thing happening. Right?

The dollar is underpinned by this idea of American military supremacy. Now when we screw up in Afghanistan, we screw up in Iraq, it diminishes that. Houthis sink an aircraft carrier. Well, one of them gets through. Or the US Navy shoots down its own planes just a few weeks ago.

If we get into any kind of conflict in the South China Sea over Taiwan, and, again, the navy runs their typical predictable playbook and puts carriers or a bunch of small ships in range of a lot of big Chinese missiles. The image of a US nuclear aircraft carrier, on fire, sinking, horrifically bad to the entire American paradigm.

And, that’s why we need to wake up, lose weight, and get ready and be innovative and focus on lethality and merit and get the military back to that kind of paradigm.

Israel’s Military Strategy

LARRY P. ARNN: So the, I’m a I’ve always been, all my life, a big supporter of Israel and a big admirer of the Israeli Defense Force, and I have heard a criticism you’ve made of them. Explain that.

ERIK PRINCE: Well, when the first of all, huge complacency that they ignored the fact they because they thought, we have complete intelligence knowledge of what’s going on in Gaza. There’s no signals intelligence that’s indicating. And so what did the enemy do? They adapted, obviously, and they went to face-to-face meetings. They didn’t send anything electronically while making the same amount of noise as always just to not attract suspicion.

October 7 happens. Of course, there’s going to be a military response, but the Hamas guys have built 300 plus miles of tunnels all through Gaza. And tunnel warfare is hell everywhere, whether it’s in Iwo Jima, Okinawa, Vietcong, you know, the Cu Chi tunnels of Vietnam, everywhere that’s bad. And the IDF walked in and gave Hamas the fight that Hamas wanted to have because Hamas wants to maximize civilian casualties while holding hostages and to prolong their survival. And sure enough, Hamas has survived.

Look at those videos of the Israeli hostage return ceremonies. There is a battalion strength of Hamas guys in uniform. Yes. They’re posing for TV, but Hamas is definitely not defeated. And for them to survive, they win.

LARRY P. ARNN: What would they do?

ERIK PRINCE: I went to Israel three weeks after October 7 with because I know, I’ve met lots of brilliant Jewish financiers that have financed a lot of oil deals. I’ve never met a Jewish roughneck. I got a guy that runs a rig. And I have. I know quite a few of those guys, and I brought them the best driller in Texas. Literally, the guys that do the horizontal precision drilling for Exxon and for SpaceX. Two pretty sophisticated customers. And I said, look. We can drill horizontally from inside Israel through all these Gaza tunnels and flood literally with the with something the size of this table. With 12,000 horsepower turbine-driven pumps and just flood the hell out of everything underneath Gaza with seawater. Why do we want to do that? Because it takes away Hamas’ ability to maneuver. It destroys all the underground weapons caches, and it makes them move the hostages to the surface.

They do not want dead hostages. They want the hostages that they can negotiate with. That’s I think that would have been the Churchill move. If he was in charge, he would have done the bob and weave instead of the absolute dumb frontal assault because bombing civilians, while you’re trying to get to the tunnels underneath or whatever, is going to kill a lot of them. And it and I think it twenty or thirty years of positive PR for Israel got wiped out by a very, I would say, poorly thought out campaign and not very innovative.

Now the what the intelligence services did with the pagers in, you know, infiltrating, manipulated explosive pagers into the supply chain of Hezbollah, absolutely brilliant. Probably one of the greatest intelligence coups I’ve ever read. The fact that they put a pager on 3,000 of their enemy’s hips and could clack it off. At the same time, having sent the message, the message was sent from Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah. So everybody’s looking at it, and I think they took out 24 to 26 hundred of the 3,000 that they issued. It was extraordinary success.

LARRY P. ARNN: Yeah.

ERIK PRINCE: So, again, who is the junior person that came to the Monday morning meeting and said, “hey. I think we should put explosives in all their pagers.” Like, who does that? Right? That is a very countercultural, very bold, very, that is a wildcatter move. Clearly, it paid off. And good on them good on them for having a culture that could accept that.

The problem with the CIA, the US military, we do not have a culture that can in any way embrace that kind of innovation or risk-taking anymore.

LARRY P. ARNN: I read an article by Edward Luttwak, who’s a heck of a guy in my opinion. He’s like me. He’s an old man now. But, he says that the Israelis are the best in the world at attacking those tunnels, the way they do it, the way their armored personnel carriers protect better than ours, he says. Anyway, the point is your argument is they didn’t need to do it at all.

ERIK PRINCE: Don’t even give them the fight they want. Yeah. They cannot defend against water.

Alternative Strategies for Gaza

ERIK PRINCE: And even if you can’t find and drill to the exact tunnel, fine. I’ve spent enough time in North Carolina building Blackwater. Make a duck impoundment. What is a duck impoundment? You take a thousand meter by a thousand meter area, give a small berm around the outside, and you just pump water on the surface.

And eventually, water will find its way into every orifice, and you would have saturated every tunnel, the fast way drilling or the slow way by saturation. Either way, the outcome is the same. Water will fill up all those tunnels way faster than Hamas could drain them and take that away from their ability to fight. The Israelis will say, “oh, yeah. We tried drilling. We tried drilling and flooding.” This, a pipe this size, is not a serious effort. That’s a joke.

I remember one moment. I have to make a plug for Texas here because we had this call with the chief of their MAFAT, which is their DARPA, and their chief of their combat engineers. And I will say, the combat engineers that were closest to the edge of battle that were actually having to do the job, they fully embraced what we were trying to do. It was the headquarters people that said no. But we’re doing a conference call with Bobby, the CEO of this Texas drilling company because the Israelis are saying, “well, we tried directional drilling a few years ago. It didn’t work. There was clay. It took too long. It wasn’t accurate and all the rest.” And Bobby said, “well, last year, I had to drill from one side of the Mississippi River to the other. And you can imagine there’s some clay, and the boys and I were having a contest, and I was aiming for a stake on the far side, and I hit the stake. Is that good enough for you?” And it was a great Texas mic drop moment.

LARRY P. ARNN: I see.

ERIK PRINCE: But, again, private sector, the man knew his business, and all we want to do is make that available. It was even I had donors lined up to fund the whole thing. That’s the frustrating part of it. So again, who could objectively say that IDF, fifteen months after the October 7 attack, having to negotiate with Hamas, turn over thousands of captured prisoners back to Hamas, who are going to be more radicalized than ever now, to get the hostages back, how is that a good outcome? How can they say that’s a win?

LARRY P. ARNN: Yep. I think that’s right.

ERIK PRINCE: It’s not to insult the men. The men and women that had to do the job at the bleeding edge of battle, I say it’s a failure of imagination of their leadership.

SEAL Thinking and Military Innovation

LARRY P. ARNN: You’re not the typical guy, but I wonder, is this sort of SEAL kind of thinking? Is there a lot of people who think like this about war in the military?

ERIK PRINCE: I think the thing about the SEAL teams, one of the things they kind of beat into in training already is if you’re not cheating, you’re not trying. So, again, are there really rules that we’re artificially imposing on this here? Let’s just find a way to win, to defeat, to befuddle our enemy, and make them wonder how the hell did they just do that?

There’s a lot of very innovative people that come out of that community. And I was in the, I look. A lot of people had an idea that a training facility was needed to support those kind of units. I was in the very unusual position that my father was very successful. He left me with resources, and I employed some of those to build a thing and it definitely worked.

And but the fun part of that organization was the people because it was basically a special operations unit melded with some of the best practices. So our ideal people were a soft guy, army, navy, marine, whatever, that did a few years, maybe a full career, but no generals, no colonels. Senior enlisted, staff officer kind of people, and they maybe worked in some kind maybe they got an MBA, worked for a private company for a little bit, and they came and joined us.

The president of the company, Gary Jackson, never went to college, was a SEAL warrant officer, but an amazing leader in that he could he was so comfortable with himself that he could pick people far more talented in whatever lane they had to be, and he managed to keep all those very alpha male personalities in check and all focused in the same direction.

He had a rule that was called the fifteen-minute pissed off rule. You can say or do just about anything in a boardroom setting. If you have a disagreement as to something that’s going on, and at the end, you decide, resolve it, and you don’t carry grudges and we move forward. It was fantastic bunch of people.

Private Military Contractors and Accountability

LARRY P. ARNN: Now you’ve written and done a lot in the world of private soldiers, and you’ve made the case that we’ve always used them in America. In a certain way, by the way, our military at its most distinguished moments has been great because they’re really civilians doing military for a while. So tell me, if you have private soldiers, how do you keep them accountable? How does that work?

ERIK PRINCE: First of all, the approach of and whether they’re private soldiers or part-time soldiers, I would rather have them working in the private sector doing something manufacturing, farming, whatever they’re doing, and commandos part of the time or soldiers part of the time. It’s much healthier if we got more towards a much bigger guard approach, national guard, to our military versus a very expensive standing military, it’s better because politicians are less apt to use the military if they have to actually activate…

LARRY P. ARNN: That resonates the founding argument against standing armies.

ERIK PRINCE: Standing armies. Exactly. And I’ve been concerned. I was on the board of the Army War College for a while, and they gave me a medal because not for valor, but because I didn’t act like a jackass on the board. But, I always liked the colonels. They were the students. And I only sometimes like the generals. I did like a couple of them.

But we had one of the most interesting discussions. Because, like, my father was in the military, you know, and all his brothers. And people are not in the military anymore. And It’s a huge problem in American society. Look. I believe in the merits of an all-volunteer force. The danger of that is you have one half of one percent of the society in the military, another three or four percent that knows the half percent, leaving ninety-five percent of America with no clue about what the military is, what it’s supposed to do. And I think it’s allowed idiot politicians that have no idea about the military to take the military in all kinds of non-value added directions to that distract from lethality and merit.

LARRY P. ARNN: Which and it really cripples the military. You asked the question about accountability.

ERIK PRINCE: If you are doing something for the United States government, then I think the Uniform Code of Military Justice is an appropriate remedy for that. And that makes the most sense. When I had lots of I had thousands of contractors working for the US government, we would have preferred to be under the UCMJ versus if there’s an infraction, to have it tried in a civilian court five thousand miles away from the edge of battle where there’s been no understanding of a car bombing or snipers or all the dangerous aspects of war. Fortunately, America the American civilian population doesn’t have to experience that. But having the accountability closest to where the danger is, makes the most sense.

Expanding the National Guard

LARRY P. ARNN: This idea of expansion of the guard, is that could that be some sort of a cure of this separation between the civilian population and the military? Just have a lot of people in the guard?

ERIK PRINCE: I, seeing this so the army special forces has a very good national guard program, and it’s called nineteenth and twentieth group where you can join the army, go through infantry, airborne, all the rest, go to special forces, and then you get out and you’re in the guard. And so you are, you know, eighty percent, ninety percent of your life. You’re doing your private sector thing. You’re a doctor, lawyer, businessman, farmer, and you go do commando stuff, every month or two or for a few weeks a year, that is a much healthier mix.

And I have employed hundreds and hundreds of guardsmen like that in the Blackwater days, and the skill sets they bring and the maturity they bring of private sector experience where one of them might be alignment for a power company or another one might be a heavy engine mechanic or a lawyer. When you put that myriad of skill sets in the field, it’s amazing the kind of solutions they can come up with that a, active duty only experience base, can draw from.

But the business of America should be business, is business. It’s not warfare. And when you look at how America was founded, it was not founded by the British army. It was founded by companies. Massachusetts Bay, Jamestown, Plymouth colonies were companies that were listed on the city of London’s exchange.

They hired people like John Smith and Miles Standish, private military contractors that were professional soldiers that joined on to work for this company to protect the encampment in the new world, and that worked. And that is the model of American capitalism governance that we should replicate thousands of places elsewhere around the world. Voluntarily, not as forced colonies anywhere else, but why are millions of people invading America every year? They’re coming for American governance. There’s ways that the capitalism can provide that kind of private cities, private, innovation and efficiency and effectiveness into some of these, failing areas peripherally that we can do so and export the what’s best about America and not impose it on people that don’t want to be imposed on.

The Power of Ownership and Individual Stakes

LARRY P. ARNN: See, I think I get to use the word regime again. So Victor Hansen is a… Love that guy. Old great friend of mine.

ERIK PRINCE: I love that man too.

LARRY P. ARNN: And in his books, he explains why the Greeks could beat the Persians. And his explanation is basically they were owners.

ERIK PRINCE: Oh, yes.

LARRY P. ARNN: And they could cooperate better because they had a stake, each individual one. There’s this great line in Herodotus, first book of history ever written about the Persian wars. And there’s a defecting Spartan king, and he’s advising Xerxes. And Xerxes he’s showing Xerxes the order of battle. And Xerxes says, “I don’t see where are the people who whipped the soldiers into the fight.”

ERIK PRINCE: You see? Exactly. And that’s and see that’s makes us more powerful. And it you know, when you say that the nation needs to lose weight, that means individually too. And, you know, it’s good for a person to serve.

Well, in Peru, right, in the eighties, you had a terrible communist insurgency, the Shining Path, a Maoist sponsored insurgency. And Hernando de Soto came back from Switzerland, said, why is Switzerland so great? Why is Peru such a mess? One of the things they did was land reform. And once they gave title of the land to the country people, to the farmers, no more insurgency. Why? Because the farmer said, “get off my land. This is my piece there, commie. I don’t need you.”

LARRY P. ARNN: I knew that guy. I think he died.

ERIK PRINCE: Nope. He’s alive. Just saw him a couple weeks ago. He’s in great health.

LARRY P. ARNN: Good. He’s still still a dancing fool. He, he told me a story. He came he’s been here a couple of times. He told me a story once. They didn’t have any, property lines…

ERIK PRINCE: Yeah.

LARRY P. ARNN: So they couldn’t have property right.

ERIK PRINCE: Right.

LARRY P. ARNN: And so what he did what what they did, he got he canceled people to walk around in a neighborhood and see where the dog barks, and that would be the property line.

ERIK PRINCE: Yep. It’s pretty clever. And now today with the GPS, you can walk around with a high res GPS in your back, and you can literally print out a title at the edge of the at the end of the walk.

The Unplugged Phone

LARRY P. ARNN: See. Well, I, so I want to plug your unplugged phone. Is that an unplugged phone?

ERIK PRINCE: Of course, it is.

LARRY P. ARNN: Yes. Tell tell about that.

ERIK PRINCE: So, this is an unplugged phone, and this is a result of the 2020 election and seeing the nonsense of big tech canceling certain voices and kind of controlling or throttling free speech. And so we said we’re going to build our own phone that is independent of the Google and Apple universe that really focuses on privacy and security because your existing phone really, there’s an entire industry created called surveillance capitalism.

The Unplugged Phone (continued)

ERIK PRINCE: And it grew out of 9/11 when the government’s looking for a needle in a stack of needles looking for other people of terrorist profile, and it started with regular analog advertising data. And they really started buying billions of dollars worth of that. And then smartphones come out, and there’s software development kits designed to go on your smartphone to maximize that data collection. Where you go, what you buy, who you call, what you browse, all that goes to advertisers so they can advertise to you. The government uses that to surveil the hell out of you as well.

So this is an unplugged phone, and it does not have an advertising ID. Your phone has the 32-digit alphanumeric code, which works with all the apps at the root level to collect and export. Your phone, probably around two or three AM, makes a 50 megabyte phone home transmitting. Well, it’s just like ET.

This phone, that doesn’t happen because it blocks all the apps on your phone from collecting. And so we have our own privacy center, which blocks all the ad trackers, unsecure Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, all those things that you think. Right? Even if you say you’re blocking location services on your iPhone or Google no. It’s all being collected and exported.

This is the opposite of that. So this is a phone for free people. It actually has a self-destruct feature. So if someone says, “Mister Arnn, give me your phone. I’m here to inspect it.” You can unlock it with a code, and you hand them a brick. It’s an instant hard reset.

It has a kill switch, which actually separates the electronics from the battery so that off is actually off. You can shut this phone off. You can’t shut your phone off.

LARRY P. ARNN: And it does all the stuff you need, does it?

ERIK PRINCE: Yeah. Yeah. Sure. I fly all over the world with this. I navigate, communicate, airlines, banking, you name it. It all works on here.

LARRY P. ARNN: Alright. Are you going to do it to work with Starlink?

ERIK PRINCE: Eventually. I think the T-Mobile SIM, will start to work with Starlink so that will be compatible as well. Yeah. So, look, you can people can order at unplugged.com. We’ve sold through our first ten thousand, and it’s selling well. We sell in the US and Canada for now and then, Europe by end of summer.

Closing Thoughts

LARRY P. ARNN: Well, I want to close with this. You’re such an interesting man. And, your ideas that you know, you’ve thought through war and you’ve thought through business and you understand the association between them.

ERIK PRINCE: There’s really I’m not in any way an original thinker. I read a lot of history, have tried to apply lessons, and the stuff we’ve learned from Blackwater from doing the recruiting, vetting, equipping, training, deploying of people to do a difficult thing is analogous to a military, and it’s given us a unique perspective, I guess.

LARRY P. ARNN: Well, I hope you become evermore influential. I didn’t know you when the Blackwater stuff started and there was a national scandal. And all around here, we all thought, that’s gotta be a great guy. So and I’m proud to know you, and I thank you for doing the podcast.

ERIK PRINCE: Thank you, sir.

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