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Darren Farber on Iran, China, and the Rise of Neoprimes

2026-05-26 - 46 min - source - Read full transcript
Patrick O'Shaughnessy (host)Darren Farber

Key insights

Winning a modern conflict like the Iran contingency is a politically defined outcome, not a militarily defined one, and by that standard a reopened Strait of Hormuz plus degraded Iranian military capability would count as a win even without regime change.
Farber argues the department's actual internal order (frago) was to degrade Iranian military capability, which has been achieved, but the strait remaining functionally closed means the economic objective has not been met. He frames the debate as whether reopening a pre-existing chokepoint was worth the cost, since the US can absorb more short-term economic pain than its adversary.
democratic-warfighting-doctrine
A hybridized Marxist-martyrdom ideology in parts of the Shia Islamist world (which Farber traces to the writings of Ali Shariati) makes conventional definitions of victory inapplicable, because self-destruction is treated as evidence of winning.
Farber cites Hamas in Gaza as the clearest example: despite being militarily leveled, adherents can still claim they are 'ascending' by being brought to the brink of destruction. He argues this forces democracies to choose between compromising their moral limits to defeat a fanatical adversary or accepting a war of attrition they cannot cleanly win.
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Congress's one-year appropriations cycle and recurring continuing resolutions (which bar new program starts) are structurally strangling the US defense industrial base, and multi-year procurement authority is the single biggest fix Farber wants.
He notes the department averages four to five continuing resolutions a year, each of which freezes new starts even as commercial technology iterates faster. He wants Congress to create multi-year contracts for ordnance (Tomahawks, 155mm shells) similar to how joint-program aircraft get durable, multi-year manufacturer commitments.
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The Ukraine war showed that a technology's commercial cost curve, not its legacy military pedigree, now determines how fast it iterates on the battlefield: cheap, garage-buildable drones went through roughly 50 design iterations in three years.
Farber argues the low cost of losing a drone, combined with commercial supply-chain accessibility, is what let Ukrainian drone capability evolve unrecognizably fast compared to traditional weapons programs. He expects this commercial-cost-curve dynamic to increasingly determine which capabilities win in future conflicts.
neoprime-defense-companies
Neoprime defense companies have already proven their value in targeting and signals intelligence, but broader force-projection capability outside drones has not yet been proven, because new systems must first be integrated into the military's joint concept of warfare before they see wide fielded use.
Farber pushes back on the criticism that neoprime products 'aren't being used' in current conflicts: fielding a new capability requires exercising and integrating it into joint doctrine, which takes time and isn't a fair test until that integration happens. He also notes today's precision-focused warfare has sacrificed the sheer mass of firepower seen in WWII, and thinks targeting software and cheaper precision hardware need to bring some of that mass back.
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China and Iran's regimes are simultaneously very strong (in control of state apparatus and enormous economic and industrial mass) and very weak (fundamentally illegitimate, low-trust, and corrupt), and Farber believes both will fall within his lifetime.
He points to China's frequent turnover of senior military leadership, disappearance of officials close to Xi Jinping, and lack of jointness and internal corruption as symptoms of an illegitimate power structure where no one fully trusts anyone else. He compares this to the Soviet Union, which looked monolithic until it collapsed rapidly once its illegitimate internal structure gave way.
great-power-legitimacy
US clandestine services have substantially rebuilt intelligence-gathering capability inside China's leadership after previously losing significant capability through a series of compromised assets, exploiting the fact that every member of China's ruling standing committee has relatives living freely in the United States.
Farber frames this personal connection to American freedom as the enduring American 'edge': officials on the outs with the regime have an escape plan, and the US spends resources daily working to make the illegitimate Chinese political structure weaker from within.
great-power-legitimacy
Farber expects China to more likely absorb Taiwan through political accommodation (a KMT election win) than through a costly, world-ostracizing military invasion, though the odds of force rise if Xi Jinping feels he is running out of time to complete what he sees as his life's central achievement.
He cites China scholar Kevin Rudd's characterization of Xi as a risk-taker for whom Taiwan's absorption is the unfinished business of the CCP takeover of imperial China. Farber argues a Taiwan takeover, by force or otherwise, would likely not stop there, citing Japan's historical grievances with China as a reason Tokyo is now pushing hard for stronger defense.
great-power-legitimacy
AI models are vulnerable to deliberate information poisoning, where fabricated facts seeded online (like an invented medical condition documented on the open web) get absorbed into a model's knowledge and repeated as true, a danger that compounds if AI enters military decision-making loops.
Farber cites an example where researchers invented a fake disease, posted it publicly for a few months, and had a large language model confidently confirm the fabricated condition as real. He worries about an 'alternative universe' where models become unreliable 'towers of Babel' if adversaries deliberately corrupt the information those systems are trained or reasoned on.
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A twenty-year plan by Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood to co-opt American university teaching and institutions after being excluded from the Oslo Accords is documented in FBI transcripts from a single hotel-room conversation, and Farber says it worked.
He frames this as evidence that shifts in Western opinion often attributed to organic moral consensus are sometimes the product of decades-long, deliberately designed influence campaigns, and connects it to the broader question of how much free-speech latitude a democracy can afford before disinformation and hostile influence operations exploit it.
democratic-warfighting-doctrine

Books referenced

Companies

Techniques and frameworks

Summary

Patrick O'Shaughnessy's second conversation with Darren Farber, managing partner of the defense-focused investment firm Albion River and a former special advisor to the Deputy Undersecretary of Defense, was recorded in the middle of the US-Iran military contingency and ranges across what "winning" even means in an open-ended conflict, how illegitimate the Chinese and Iranian regimes really are underneath their apparent strength, and what it will take for a new generation of venture-backed "neoprime" defense companies to actually replace the legacy primes. Farber opens by arguing that victory in Iran is a politically defined outcome, not a strictly military one: a reopened Strait of Hormuz and materially degraded Iranian military capability would count as a win, even without regime change, because the US can absorb more economic pain than its adversary. He spends considerable time on why that calculus is complicated by a hybridized Marxist-martyrdom ideology present in parts of the Shia Islamist world, under which self-destruction is reframed as spiritual ascension, making conventional victory conditions moot against adversaries like Hamas.

A substantial thread of the conversation contrasts two Cold War doctrines, Eisenhower's massive-retaliation deterrence and Maxwell Taylor's flexible, proportional response, and argues the US needs both: a purely nuclear deterrent would be too blunt an instrument, while flexible power requires the "magazine depth" (stockpiled munitions and sustained production capacity) that Congress's one-year appropriations cycle and recurring continuing resolutions actively undermine. Farber's clearest policy ask is multi-year procurement authority for ordnance, similar to how joint aircraft programs already secure durable manufacturer commitments, because current-year-only funding freezes new starts and is, in his words, killing industry's ability to keep pace with faster-moving commercial technology.

On China and Iran, Farber holds two seemingly contradictory ideas at once: both regimes are enormously strong, commanding state apparatus, industrial mass, and population scale, and enormously weak, because both are fundamentally illegitimate dictatorships riddled with internal distrust and corruption. He points to frequent turnover in China's senior military leadership, the mysterious disappearance of officials close to Xi Jinping, and a "mafia-style" description of the Iranian regime by scholar Abbas Milani as evidence. He believes both regimes will fall within his lifetime, drawing an analogy to the Soviet Union, which looked monolithic in internal Pentagon assessments right up until it rapidly collapsed. On Taiwan specifically, he thinks a bloodless political absorption via a KMT election win is more likely than an invasion, though the odds of force rise the more Xi feels time pressure to complete what Farber frames as his life's defining achievement.

The Ukraine war provides Farber's central case study for how commercial technology cost curves, not legacy military pedigree, now drive battlefield iteration speed: cheap, garage-buildable drones went through roughly fifty design iterations in three years because the cost of losing one is low and the underlying components are commercially accessible. He applies this lens to defend the neoprime defense-startup cohort (led by Anduril) against the charge that their products aren't proven in real conflicts, arguing that new systems have to be integrated into the military's existing joint concept of warfare before wide fielded use is fair to expect, and that neoprime capabilities have already proven themselves specifically in targeting and signals intelligence.

The conversation closes on two adjacent risks: how AI could be weaponized through deliberate information poisoning, illustrated by an experiment where researchers seeded a fabricated medical condition online and had a language model confidently confirm it as real, a vulnerability Farber worries about if AI enters military decision-making loops; and how a documented twenty-year campaign by Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood to co-opt American university institutions after the Oslo Accords (traced to FBI transcripts of a single hotel-room conversation) illustrates how deliberately engineered influence campaigns, not organic shifts in moral consensus, can reshape Western opinion over time, forcing hard questions about how much free-speech latitude a democracy can afford.

Notable Quotes

"Dictators are enormously strong and enormously weak at the same time... A dictatorship can be enormously weak because they're illegitimate. They haven't been tested. They only have to be stronger than their strongest opposition and opposition is outlawed." - Darren Farber

"I believe in our lifetime, China will fall. I believe in our lifetime, Iran will fall." - Darren Farber

"It's not a fair criticism to say, oh, the neoprimes stuff's not being used at the limit in war. It's because we have to integrate it into the joint concept of warfare." - Darren Farber

"Can you imagine if you can create a foundation of fact that is wrong for a model? I could see an alternative universe where the models become complete towers of Babel." - Darren Farber