Speaker 1: You're listening to Asia Centric from Globerg Intelligence, the podcast
Speaker 1: that pulls back the curtain non global business so you
Speaker 1: can invest better across the Pacific rim. I'm Tom Corbett
Speaker 1: in Hong Kong.
Speaker 2: And I'm John Lee. The Russia Ukraine war is forcing
Speaker 2: governments to rethink their conceptions of war, the role of
Speaker 2: technology and military spending.
Speaker 1: The rise of Asia's economic prosperity this century has also
Speaker 1: been accompanied by a large build up in defense spending
Speaker 1: across the region.
Speaker 2: How will technology and artificial intelligence reshape the global balance
Speaker 2: of power? Who stands to win or lose? And can
Speaker 2: the US and China make the hard choices to keep
Speaker 2: growth alive and keep global business prosperous.
Speaker 3: I think what has changed, especially looking at Russia's invasion
Speaker 3: of Ukraine, is that that idea that wars will be short, bloodless,
Speaker 3: clean has evaporated.
Speaker 1: Let's bring in Kevin Brand, aerospace and defense analyst with
Speaker 1: Bloomberg Intelligence. He joins us from Washington.
Speaker 3: Kevin, Welcome, Thanks Tom, John, Pleasure to be with you.
Speaker 2: Hi, Kevin. Are we in a global arms race? Everywhere?
Speaker 2: I read countries like Japan, Korea, Australia, China, Poland are
Speaker 2: all increasing their defense budgets.
Speaker 3: Yeah, great question. I think the answer is to some degree, yes. Now,
Speaker 3: I wouldn't characterize that as potentially an arms race, but
Speaker 3: the investment that you're seeing sort of across the board
Speaker 3: builth in Europe now and in Asia and to a lesser
Speaker 3: extent in parts of Latin America is definitely been spurred
Speaker 3: by global events, not the least of which has been
Speaker 3: the Russia's invasion of Ukraine, both in twenty fourteen in
Speaker 3: the most recent invasion that sort of threw off the
Speaker 3: veil of wars of aggression in the modern era are impossible,
Speaker 3: and so that has kind of regalvanized people needing to
Speaker 3: spend money on their defense infrastructure and be able to
Speaker 3: protect their own borders.
Speaker 2: And which countries are seeing the biggest increase in military
Speaker 2: expend each other?
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, right now, the biggest jump is in Europe
Speaker 3: as they're starting to move back towards their two percent
Speaker 3: pledge of GDP for NATO defense spending. So that's probably
Speaker 3: what's in the lead right now based on current events.
Speaker 3: But historically, what I would say over the last ten
Speaker 3: or so years, really since Secretary Clinton went to Shangrila
Speaker 3: in about the two thousand and eleven time frame and
Speaker 3: announced the US pivot to Asia. You've seen Asian defense
Speaker 3: spending really rise at double digits if you look at
Speaker 3: China specifically in East Asia up seventy two percent really
Speaker 3: since about twenty and eleven, so massive defense spending. You're
Speaker 3: seeing the same thing in Japan right now, in Korea,
Speaker 3: to a lesser extent, in Thailand, Indonesia, in parts of Singapore.
Speaker 1: And what do you think explains that, Kevin? Is it
Speaker 1: that we're just in a different world now? Is it
Speaker 1: that we've got one superpower trying to hold its ground
Speaker 1: while another one slowly emerges or is it more complex
Speaker 1: than that?
Speaker 3: No, I think that's exactly it. If you really look
Speaker 3: at what happened since the demise of the Soviet Union
Speaker 3: sort of the nineteen ninety one time frame, where we
Speaker 3: had a unipolar world very very quickly, that security environment
Speaker 3: enabled really the Asian countries we used to refer to
Speaker 3: them as the Asian Tigers, right, Their economies just really exploded,
Speaker 3: giving birth to middle classes, upper income that allowed people
Speaker 3: to spend on defense. But really what that did is
Speaker 3: as those economic ties sort of became more and more robust,
Speaker 3: and you had in large increases in trade. There was
Speaker 3: a natural tendency that those countries who were benefiting from
Speaker 3: those trade wanted to be able to secure those trade lanes.
Speaker 3: So China's rise is a perfect example of that expanding
Speaker 3: of their military to secure their own trade and relationships,
Speaker 3: to be able to provide for their own defense. But
Speaker 3: the second and the biggest trend I think there is
Speaker 3: as the rise of China came up, as they became
Speaker 3: a little bit more assertive in the region, that tension
Speaker 3: of a rising power meeting and established power has led
Speaker 3: the rest of Asia to sort of hedge their bets.
Speaker 3: They don't want to have to pick a side between
Speaker 3: the United States and China. China's going to remain probably
Speaker 3: their number one economic trading partner, but from a security perspective,
Speaker 3: the United States is sort of that guarantee of security,
Speaker 3: but neither country wants to pick a side.
Speaker 2: And how much more can military expenditure go for these countries.
Speaker 3: There is a large draw especially with this uncertainty sort
Speaker 3: of in the global economic environment where there's going to
Speaker 3: be a recession next year in the United States or
Speaker 3: in Europe. That sort of drives the rest of the
Speaker 3: globe into a recessionary period. That could put a lot
Speaker 3: of pressures on discretionary spending in these countries and social programs,
Speaker 3: especially in China as you look at sort of the
Speaker 3: aging of the population results the legacies of the one
Speaker 3: child policy, having to pay for parents, the evaporation sort
Speaker 3: of decline of the housing bubble which hasn't burst yet
Speaker 3: but is in difficult straits. That's going to pressurize in
Speaker 3: lots of places the available money for defense. My best
Speaker 3: guess looking at sort of the trend lines is places
Speaker 3: like Thailand, Japan, Korea, maybe Indonesian Philippines. To a lesser extent,
Speaker 3: you could see growth at around the six percent mark,
Speaker 3: above the rate of inflation. But everywhere else I think
Speaker 3: you're going to see that sort of moderate into the
Speaker 3: two to three percent range, which, if inflation remains high globally,
Speaker 3: will actually be a net decline in global spending per GDP.
Speaker 2: Kevin, let's move to the US. We've been hearing a
Speaker 2: lot about this debt ceiling and the issues it seems
Speaker 2: to crop up every year. Is this impacting the increase
Speaker 2: in potential US spending on defense?
Speaker 3: It is, But more importantly, it throws into this perpetual
Speaker 3: conversation about can we pass a National Defense authorization on time?
Speaker 3: Can we pass the defense budget on time? Debt ceiling aside.
Speaker 3: Sort of a larger thing that tends to be at
Speaker 3: play is consistently funding defense so that the defense industrial base,
Speaker 3: those industries and contractors that really supply the training, the
Speaker 3: equipment that the UNUIS military relies upon, has a steady
Speaker 3: demand sigle, so they can actually forecast for what they
Speaker 3: need to spend, as we're seeing play out in Ukraine
Speaker 3: right now. If you just look at the amount of
Speaker 3: munitions that they're you really can't surge your industrial base
Speaker 3: in time of war. And if you can't give them
Speaker 3: a predictive demand, they can't invest for the future to
Speaker 3: have that supply base where you need it to be.
Speaker 1: Kevin Brand Back during the Reagan era, President Reagan pretty
Speaker 1: much gave the Defense Department everything it asked for, or
Speaker 1: at least pretty close. We are in a much different
Speaker 1: era now when it comes to the cost of maintaining
Speaker 1: our defense capabilities technologically and otherwise. How do you see
Speaker 1: those higher costs? I assume they are higher costs now.
Speaker 1: Relating to the nation's ability to fund them. So I
Speaker 1: think there's two sort of macro trends. One John alluded
Speaker 1: to earlier with the debt ceiling. We continue to borrow,
Speaker 1: We continue to spend above the revenues that the United
Speaker 1: States brings in. That has two large implications. One is
Speaker 1: the size of the discretionary budget in the United States
Speaker 1: continues to shrink as we have to fund sort of
Speaker 1: mandatory spending social Security, Medicare, and service the debt. So
Speaker 1: as the debt takes a larger and larger chunk of
Speaker 1: the national budget, that's going to squeeze discretionary spending, which
Speaker 1: includes defense. The second thing is the United States pensiant
Speaker 1: for high end precision guided munitions and just in time manufacturing,
Speaker 1: so where you kind of leaned out your supply chains.
Speaker 1: That places a premium on sort of the prices you pay,
Speaker 1: and as you pursue higher technologies, in some cases the
Speaker 1: technologies aren't as proven or as you have to test
Speaker 1: those and certify that those weapons systems are safe to use.
Speaker 1: When they're leading edge technology, that tends to become very expensive,
Speaker 1: and what we see happening typically is initial order quantities
Speaker 1: decline over time. So we may have a forecasted buy
Speaker 1: of one hundred units of aircraft or ships, and very
Speaker 1: quickly those truncate down to thirty or twenty, and the
Speaker 1: cost per unit rises pretty high. And those higher costs
Speaker 1: are coming at a time when arguably the stakes geopolitically
Speaker 1: are just as high as they've been or even higher.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's very unfortunate for the United States. We're in
Speaker 3: a position now where having been the world's sort of
Speaker 3: sole superpower for a while and with a penchant for
Speaker 3: high technology, our labor markets and our costs to produce
Speaker 3: any unit have gone up exponentially. That is not the
Speaker 3: case in other parts of the world. China is catching
Speaker 3: up in their labor costs to a rising but they
Speaker 3: can still produce equipment much cheaper than the United States.
Speaker 1: And the implications for that are Yeah.
Speaker 3: So the implications are over time we will reach near
Speaker 3: parity across all the warfighting areas in the air domain,
Speaker 3: in the surface domain, and the undersea domain, and potentially
Speaker 3: space and information warfare, which as we've seen in Russia,
Speaker 3: that competition for the information domain the public narrative is
Speaker 3: increasingly important. But what that really means is all of
Speaker 3: these bodies of war fighting domain are going to be contested,
Speaker 3: and the United States is going to have to work
Speaker 3: with its allies and partner partners in the region to
Speaker 3: sort of equal the combat power essentially of China. This
Speaker 3: way the throw weight of China.
Speaker 2: Kevin, So, you brought up an interesting point. The US
Speaker 2: still spends a lot more money than China on defense front,
Speaker 2: but you're saying that China just gets more value for
Speaker 2: the buck.
Speaker 3: That's right, if you think about it in terms of
Speaker 3: purchasing parity power, right, China is at a strategic advantage
Speaker 3: on costs for what they can afford. The other thing, though,
Speaker 3: really that doesn't get as much play, is they have
Speaker 3: invested heavily in their defense industrial base. You know, notwithstanding
Speaker 3: the sort of the blending of private ownership and state
Speaker 3: run directed economies. But if you just look at the
Speaker 3: size and scale of the defense industry that China has
Speaker 3: to rely upon, their manufacturing base far exceeds that of
Speaker 3: the United States. Because, again, you know, right, wrong or indifferent,
Speaker 3: the United States has sort of leaned out its industrial base.
Speaker 3: You've seen a lot of consolidation in the defense industry,
Speaker 3: sort of the Big five primes and that lack of
Speaker 3: competition and that lack of surge capacity has really limited
Speaker 3: our ability to produce quantity at cheap price.
Speaker 1: You're listening to Asia Centric from Bloomberg Intelligence. By the way,
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Speaker 1: from our listeners. Kevin Brand. Technology has over the past
Speaker 1: century changed our lives in ways that we don't need
Speaker 1: to elaborate on. But one thing that technology has done,
Speaker 1: at least from a military perspective, is that it has
Speaker 1: enhanced the human power to kill and destroy. From your
Speaker 1: perspective and your study of the evolution technology as it
Speaker 1: applies to the military and defense, what surprises you most
Speaker 1: about how it has changed the nature of warfare?
Speaker 3: So I'd say two things. One is the United States,
Speaker 3: especially the Western allies Western Europe, we had sort of
Speaker 3: convinced ourselves that wars of aggression were going to be
Speaker 3: rare in the future or uncommon at least that had
Speaker 3: led us to smaller sales sort of contingencies. The idea
Speaker 3: that a massive show of force with high precision could
Speaker 3: have outsized impacts on the battlefield, and that allowed the
Speaker 3: United States and the West to sort of pursue these
Speaker 3: high technology, precision weapons which tended to be exclusive and
Speaker 3: very expensive, sort of the exquisite weapons systems. The second
Speaker 3: thing is we really thought that by dominating that battle
Speaker 3: space and having sort of uncontested control of the air,
Speaker 3: sea and underwater domain, that we can have those outside
Speaker 3: effects on land, on governments, on nations. And we also
Speaker 3: thought we could do this in a very quick, surgical way. Essentially,
Speaker 3: future wars would be short. I think what has changed,
Speaker 3: especially looking at Russia's invasion of Ukraine, is that that
Speaker 3: idea that wars will be short, bloodless, clean has evaporated.
Speaker 3: That doesn't mean, though, that the reason to have technology
Speaker 3: goes away. Europe this sort of a land centric theater.
Speaker 3: If you think about that domain, it requires standing armies.
Speaker 3: Controlling territory is just a hard fought slog. You can
Speaker 3: see the artillery jewels back and forth between Ukraine and Russia.
Speaker 3: The Pacific is a different domain. Vast distances, you know,
Speaker 3: twenty three time zones we're talking about in order to
Speaker 3: project power there. It takes days to get to the
Speaker 3: region from the United States from the West coast. That
Speaker 3: requires a different type of force with long range, reach, precision,
Speaker 3: fast weapons. That's why you're seeing this pursuit right now.
Speaker 3: I think of hypersonic weapons, among other things, in order
Speaker 3: to compress those times lines and battle spaces.
Speaker 2: The supersonic weapons.
Speaker 3: Ten years ago, I would have said, yes, the United
Speaker 3: States was well in the lead on hypersonic technology in
Speaker 3: our research and development. We sort of abandoned that because
Speaker 3: there wasn't a pressing need to have those technologies on board.
Speaker 3: We didn't see an offensive threat that we the United
Speaker 3: States needed to project that sort of power in the
Speaker 3: near term. That game has changed a little bit with
Speaker 3: sort of the rise of China, and we're actually playing catchup.
Speaker 3: China is a little bit ahead of the United States,
Speaker 3: probably by a couple of years.
Speaker 1: Kevin, is it going to be possible for technology to
Speaker 1: give any nation or any alliance of nations and edge
Speaker 1: a sustainable edge over another or is the nature of
Speaker 1: warfare in the future going to hinge upon something else
Speaker 1: other than technology.
Speaker 3: So the nature of warfare still is sort of unchanging
Speaker 3: contest of wills political wills among countries and the methods
Speaker 3: by which you wage that war. The technology she's involved,
Speaker 3: we'll change over time as technology changes. What I see
Speaker 3: technology doing is having a very specific role in very
Speaker 3: specific tactical situations. But what's going to matter more than
Speaker 3: the technologies because those will be sort of ubiquitous across
Speaker 3: the board equal access to people. You might have a
Speaker 3: little bit more of a technological edge in one spot
Speaker 3: or another, But the thing that's quickly coming to bear
Speaker 3: is really can you bring that technology to bear in
Speaker 3: a time and place of your choosing and in sufficient
Speaker 3: quantities to impact whatever the situation is on the battlefield
Speaker 3: or a political environment. And so it's going to be
Speaker 3: a combination of technology, speed of action, speed of decision,
Speaker 3: it's employment, and do you have this sufficient quantity to
Speaker 3: impact the situations. Those are kind of the factors that
Speaker 3: will come into play.
Speaker 2: And Kevin, with the Russia Ukraine war, what lessons are
Speaker 2: they providing defense plan is in terms of what the
Speaker 2: weapons that will be used in the future.
Speaker 3: I think what Russia's war in Ukraine has shown is
Speaker 3: that and war is really about attrition and there's no
Speaker 3: other way around that. You have to grind to a
Speaker 3: political stalemate and a negotiated settlement one way or the other.
Speaker 3: The idea of total victory is probably an illusion, and
Speaker 3: that requires investment in your defense industrial base. It requires munitions,
Speaker 3: it requires stockpiles of munitions. And if you think about
Speaker 3: I think one of the biggest things is it has
Speaker 3: thrown off this idea that in the defense space, just
Speaker 3: in time manufacturing, just in time supply is probably not
Speaker 3: the right national security decision for your country to make.
Speaker 2: And what about drones. There's been a lot of press
Speaker 2: coverage on the success of drones. Is this a game
Speaker 2: changer and a lot more country is going to adopt
Speaker 2: this technology?
Speaker 3: Yeah? Absolutely. I think there's two key technologies in there,
Speaker 3: and they're related. The first is unmanned you name it.
Speaker 3: It could be surface vessels, it could be under sea vessels,
Speaker 3: it could be aerial vehicles. And those vehicles will increasingly
Speaker 3: have sensor packages on them that could include armed sensor packages,
Speaker 3: and we'll see those employed. So I think over time
Speaker 3: you'll see a migration from large, heavy, exquisite platforms that
Speaker 3: take a long time to build to more nimble, smaller,
Speaker 3: many systems that are networked together that you can employ
Speaker 3: both from a sensor package and from a weapons employment perspective.
Speaker 3: I think that's one. The second thing I think that's
Speaker 3: going to become ubiquitous is this pursuit of artificial intelligence
Speaker 3: because as these systems and sensors proliferate, the need to
Speaker 3: make sense of the data that is coming in from
Speaker 3: all of these dispersed sensors increases, and that information overload
Speaker 3: is something that the human in the loop or the
Speaker 3: commander is going to need some help with, and these
Speaker 3: artificial intelligence tools from machine learning can help parse that
Speaker 3: information and distill down what is the most important information
Speaker 3: to act on. So that's going to be an important
Speaker 3: component of future war.
Speaker 1: And as you mentioned, speed of decision making is going
Speaker 1: to be increasingly essential to military success and in other aspects.
Speaker 3: Because of all that information that's out there. The commander
Speaker 3: who is able to understand the space make a decision,
Speaker 3: make that decision first, and make that decision accurately, and
Speaker 3: then put a weapon on a target or the most
Speaker 3: critical target first, is going to be victorious in battle.
Speaker 3: And so AI I think is going to play an
Speaker 3: increasing role or automated decision aids in some way shape or.
Speaker 1: Form our guest is Kevin Brand, thirty year Navy veteran
Speaker 1: and aerospace and defense analysts with Bloomberg Intelligence. Kevin Back
Speaker 1: in the nineteen fifties, President Dwight Eisenhower of the United
Speaker 1: States warned us for the first time about the military
Speaker 1: industrial complex. He warned us about the consequences of war
Speaker 1: essentially becoming profitable, which makes it more likely that countries
Speaker 1: might engage in it. Do you think that doctrine still holds,
Speaker 1: does it still play a role in today's theater, or
Speaker 1: is that something of the past.
Speaker 3: So I would turn that question a little bit on
Speaker 3: its head. I think if you're going to have a
Speaker 3: national security or defense policy, you need to provide for
Speaker 3: your national defense. You're going to have to rely, in
Speaker 3: some way, shape or form on your defense industrial base
Speaker 3: to provide the men, machine tooling, etc. To equip those
Speaker 3: armed forces. The relationship you have with the defense industrial
Speaker 3: base has to evolve over time. So to your point,
Speaker 3: at the end of the Cold at the end of
Speaker 3: the World War II, the defense industrial base sort of
Speaker 3: was in a very robust position coming off of mass production.
Speaker 3: You saw consolidation occur relatively rapidly in the post World
Speaker 3: War two era and then stabilize through the Cold War.
Speaker 3: At the end of the Cold War, you saw massive
Speaker 3: defense consolidation down into a few big prime contractors, and
Speaker 3: that leaning of the defense industrial base really drove up
Speaker 3: US costs and it limited competition, and it also though
Speaker 3: narrowed the surge capacity of the defense industrial base to
Speaker 3: deal with major conflict. That's going to be something that
Speaker 3: the United States has to look at and how they
Speaker 3: add some capacity to the defense industrial base, how they
Speaker 3: encourage small business startups and diversify that defense industrial base
Speaker 3: in order to bring the costs down for various weapon systems.
Speaker 2: If we're going to compete, Kevin, which companies benefit from
Speaker 2: rising defense budget spending?
Speaker 3: So in the United States right now, it's really primarily
Speaker 3: driven by your big primes. So you can think raytheel N, Lockheed,
Speaker 3: Northrop Grumman, General Electric, Boeing sort of and some of
Speaker 3: their subsidiaries. Those tend to be the big primes that
Speaker 3: are looking at the major weapon systems, the tanks, the aircraft,
Speaker 3: the surface ships. So those will continue to be major
Speaker 3: players looking ahead as you start to get into some
Speaker 3: of the more disperse drones and kind of commercial off
Speaker 3: the shelf technology proliferate to a lot of different companies
Speaker 3: that are out there. You can see aero v inmet
Speaker 3: and some others that are out there that are smaller
Speaker 3: as far as revenue goes, but are on the sort
Speaker 3: of cutting edge of weaponizing drones and small networking of
Speaker 3: unmanned platforms. In Europe, I think you're going to continue
Speaker 3: to see some defense consolidation there in the big primes,
Speaker 3: whether it's Bae and Britain, whether it's Kraus in Germany.
Speaker 3: I think there's not a hole of riementhal there's not
Speaker 3: going to be a whole lot of I think expansion
Speaker 3: in the European defense industrial base just because of the
Speaker 3: nature of the European Union. In Asia, I think you're
Speaker 3: still going to see some domination really by Japan, the
Speaker 3: major heavy industries in Japan and Korea, and to a
Speaker 3: lesser extent, you know, China and Russia, whose foreign military
Speaker 3: sales tend to proliferate through Southeast Asia and South Asia.
Speaker 2: Kevin, you worked in the US Navy for thirty years.
Speaker 2: What has surprised you most about watching the Russia.
Speaker 3: I think the first big lesson is how difficult it
Speaker 3: really is. To dislodge dug in prepared troops in a
Speaker 3: land campaign. As a Navy individual, I've studied war, but
Speaker 3: my domain of choice is sort of the air and
Speaker 3: surface space, not land warfare. And I think it's a
Speaker 3: wake up called. After sort of twenty years in Iraq
Speaker 3: and Afghanistan, the United States became sort of lighter, more mobile,
Speaker 3: looking at counterinsurgency what they would call coin type operations.
Speaker 3: And when you get back to conventional forces in a knockdown,
Speaker 3: drag out sort of competition for territory, that is a
Speaker 3: very difficult environment, something in the United States really hasn't
Speaker 3: seen since World War Two, notwithstanding in Golf War One
Speaker 3: that was a different sort of environment. We're much more
Speaker 3: akin to the urban fighting of World War Two than
Speaker 3: we were a Gulf wer type scenario.
Speaker 1: Kevin Brand wanted to shift gears. Just briefly. Let me
Speaker 1: mention two prominent business names to you, Jamie Diamond and
Speaker 1: Ken Griffin. Jamie Diamond who is the CEO of JP
Speaker 1: Morgan Chase. Ken Griffin is the head of Citadel. Both
Speaker 1: have made rather upbeat remarks recently about China, the business
Speaker 1: prospects there, the opportunity, the growth prospects given what you
Speaker 1: know about the overarching state of relations between the US
Speaker 1: and China and the rhetoric between the two countries. Are
Speaker 1: Diamond and Griffin just prescient or is there something they're overlooking.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a great point. I think, you know, first,
Speaker 3: to be fair, from a national security perspective, which is
Speaker 3: what I do, I look at sort of a long
Speaker 3: term strategic environment in competition, and the national security establishment
Speaker 3: has sort of looked at the rise of China and
Speaker 3: it's a sort of behavior in the region and said
Speaker 3: from a standpoint of US national security and US primacy
Speaker 3: that China is a threat to United States standing on
Speaker 3: the globe, and competition will ensue. That does not necessarily
Speaker 3: mean conflict aggression, but there will be a strategic competition
Speaker 3: that's at play. From a business investment standpoint, whose time
Speaker 3: horizons can be depending on whether your eventual capitalist private
Speaker 3: equity you know, could be anywhere from one to five years.
Speaker 3: You know, China's growth and the growth of other reasons.
Speaker 3: You know, you could take a look at India has
Speaker 3: the potential to reach high single digit returns, probably probably
Speaker 3: not double digit returns anymore. In GDP growth at least
Speaker 3: in China, but that far exceeds some returns that you
Speaker 3: can get elsewhere in markets. And so from a business perspective,
Speaker 3: looking at the size of the China market and looking
Speaker 3: at the growth and potential GDP, that's a very attractive proposition,
Speaker 3: especially in the near term. I think longer term strategically though,
Speaker 3: there could be some cost to companies that continue to
Speaker 3: do excessive business sort of in China, whether that's reputation costs,
Speaker 3: human rights, et cetera. But I think for the near
Speaker 3: term that the attraction is really return on investment, and
Speaker 3: that's hard to deny.
Speaker 1: Our guest has been Kevin Brand, aerospace and defense analyst
Speaker 1: with Bloomberg Intelligence and a thirty year Navy veteran. Kevin,
Speaker 1: It's been a wide ranging conversation about China military history
Speaker 1: and technology, and we look forward to staying in touch
Speaker 1: as developments unfold.
Speaker 3: Thanks Tom, John, pleasure to be here.
Speaker 1: I'm Tom Corbett in Hong Kong, and I'm John Lee.
Speaker 2: This podcast was edited by Clara Chen and you've been
Speaker 2: listening to the Asia Centric podcast