In this episode, Congressman Pat Harrigan offers a candid and insightful analysis of the ongoing war in Ukraine, describing it as a conflict that “never should have happened.” Harrigan traces the origins of the crisis to a series of strategic failures, notably the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, which signaled to Russia that it could act with impunity. He criticizes President Biden’s early assurances to Putin that the U.S. would not intervene, calling such signals “unconscionable.”
Harrigan emphasizes the importance of overwhelming military force in modern warfare, explaining that victory is typically achieved through the rapid deployment of advanced, integrated capabilities. Instead, the Biden administration’s slow, incremental supply of military aid to Ukraine has allowed Russia to adapt—what Harrigan likens to taking “one pill every three months” instead of completing a full course of antibiotics. This approach has effectively given Russia time to develop countermeasures and prolong the conflict.
The conversation then shifts to the broader challenges facing U.S. defense strategy. Harrigan, an entrepreneur who founded a defense contracting company, highlights how adversaries have stolen critical U.S. technologies, bypassing costly research and development efforts. He points to the proliferation of inexpensive yet powerful tools, such as drones, which Ukraine and Israel have successfully used against their adversaries. This “new paradigm” of warfare demands that the U.S. accelerate innovation, reduce costs, and improve intellectual property protections to maintain strategic superiority. Without adapting, Harrigan warns, the U.S. risks being overwhelmed economically and technologically by adversaries who can mass-produce effective alternatives faster and cheaper.
Transcript
**Chuck Warren: **All right, Ukraine. What are your thoughts about what's going on with it right now? Russia seems hell-bent on just taking it. What are your thoughts?
**Pat Harrigan: **It's a mess. There's no there's no question about it. It's an absolute mess. And number one, it's a war that never should have happened. It was on the heels of historic strategic weakness with America leaving Afghanistan the way that it left that effectively gave Ukraine the green light or excuse me, Russia, the green light to go into Ukraine. Biden even told Putin he wasn't going to do anything about it.
I mean, just some some unconscionable things. And then when the war occurred, we did the worst thing that we possibly could do. I think a lot of people don't realize our military is incredibly complex in terms of the capabilities that we have and the way that we win is that we bring all of the force that we have to bear, all these incredibly exquisite, very high-dollar capabilities that nobody else in the world has, and we achieve strategic overmatch over our adversaries in a very short period of time. When that doesn't happen because we end up trickling in systems like we did to Ukraine under the Biden administration, you're basically giving Russia antibiotic resistance to our capabilities.
You're giving them the ability to change their tactics, techniques and procedures to change their industrial base and adapt. to our capabilities. And so for anybody that has ever taken, you know, a Z-pack before, right, where you're supposed to take when you're sick,
you're supposed to take two pills on day one and then a pill a day for the next four days. And at the end of five days, you're healed. You're well. You know, what we've done in Ukraine is effectively like taking one pill, you know, every three months.
And here we are after three years and we're still at conflict. It really shouldn't be a question as to why.
**Sam Stone: **Congressman, one of the things – I found fascinating. The latest generation, you're kind of emblematic of this, of people coming out of our military. There's a lot of entrepreneurship coming from that.
I think a lot of you are seeing ways that you can do things to help this country out of office. You built a defense contracting company. This ties a lot to what you're talking about and going on in Ukraine. We have to really up the pace of defense innovation and the flexibility and
capability of our defense contracting networks, don't we?
**Pat Harrigan: **Simultaneously, we have to lower the costs. We've entered into a totally new paradigm where, let's just be honest about things, our adversaries have stolen a lot of our capabilities and a lot of our technologies. And so we've invested trillions of dollars to develop the technologies and
capabilities that we have to array against our adversaries' threats. And the reality is, is they haven't had to do that research and development. They're getting to enjoy the fruits of our labor because we haven't done a good enough job of protecting our intellectual property and our secrets. And they have now proliferated those technologies in very inexpensive ways.
I mean, look at drones just as a singular example. But we now have. thousand dollar capabilities that can achieve billion dollar effects on the battlefield ukraine has proven that against Russia and Israel has proven that against Iran and we're in a completely new paradigm when it comes to defense and if we don't adapt
to the proliferation of those very inexpensive yet very capable technologies. We will get overwhelmed at scale because our adversaries can win the economics of war. They can outproduce us. Even if they only have 80 percent of the technology that we have, if they have that in mass and bulk, it can overcome the 100 percent solutions that we have. And we've got to be very cognizant of that.
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