I'm John Batchel with my colleagues, Bradley Bowman of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy,

and our colleague, Ryan Broaps, publishing a report about the arsenal of democracy 2025,

where it's adequate, where it's weak, and what our allies need in the face of threats.

That would be Taiwan, that would be Israel, that would be Ukraine right now, but we can easily see other allies coming into this conversation.

Gentlemen, you make 18 recommendations.

And Ryan, I start with you. Speed and scale over risk mitigation. Translate that. What does that mean, Ryan? Yeah. So as there's been a lot of

downward pressure on the defense budget over time, it's fallen as a percent of GDP.

Congress has pressed the Pentagon to spend its money more efficiently.

And the easiest way I could explain this is using the example of express shipping from Amazon.

From a budget perspective, it's not very efficient to or get express shipping on anything.

But that's not necessarily the whole story.

Sometimes it's very important to get things quickly, such as if you're at war or soon to be at war.

And we need to get back to that mindset that getting things when they're needed matters

a lot more than trying to save, you know, an extra one or two percent

of the budget.

Brad, there seems to be a lot of civil service here.

For example, a time-bound State Department review process or the foreign military sales contracting

process.

Is Washington part of the challenge, Brad? Yes, but these are patriotic,

hardworking Americans responding to incentives and disincentives. And what we're saying is that

we got some of the priorities wrong, as Ryan just said. This is a moment for prioritizing speed and

scale. I'm thinking of George Marshall's famous quote

...