Mach Industries

Alex Epstein

@AlexEpstein

How to quickly deter China from invading Taiwan — my interview with Ethan Thornton of Mach Industries Ethan is one of the brightest, most thoughtful people I've ever met. I believe his ideas on defending the US, including our interests in Taiwan, are urgently needed. Summary 👇 The US would likely lose a military conflict with China in Taiwan and other crucial areas in the Pacific—even though we spend far more money than China does. • We face a vastly underrated economic threat (not to mention human rights) if we cannot deter China from seizing Taiwan. • China has published plans to have military readiness for a Taiwan invasion by 2027. • We depend on Taiwan for almost all high-performance semi-conductors, which are at the base of all modern industry. • Taiwan had made clear as a deterrent that it’s prepared to destroy its semiconductor facilities in the event of an invasion, but China’s increasing semiconductor manufacturing makes the threat worse for the US than China. • It’s now an open secret that the US loses most or all of its wargames in a conflict with China over Taiwan, Japan, or South Korea. • How our Navy loses to China: If we can get our ships to the Pacific, we’ll quickly run out of ammo, but the more likely scenario is that our ships—including aircraft carriers—mostly don’t get there thanks to unmanned systems and hypersonics. • How our Air Force loses to China: The Air Force has limited planes and even more limited munitions, but the increasingly bigger problem is the planes won’t take off thanks to China’s hypersonic missiles and other unmanned systems that can destroy available runways in the Pacific. • How our Army loses to China: The Army is still planning to rely on tanks, rifles, and the fighting styles of the 2010s, even though Ukraine has shown ground wars depend on drones and other mobile, decentralized, difficult-to-target assets. Example: Ukraine is actually refusing to bring gifted M1 Abrams tanks to the front line as they would be quickly destroyed by drones. • The US’s failure to have an unequivocally superior military to China is not a funding issue, given that the US spends some 3 times on defense what China does. It’s an issue of how money is spent. US weapons procurement has been fundamentally stagnant for 30 years while war has rapidly evolved based on unmanned systems. • The US’s extreme military vulnerability to China is due to us mostly spending money on the wrong things given how war has evolved. We’re still basically procuring the same weapons we were 30 years ago. • The most important evolution in warfighting is unmanned systems, which are powerful but cheap and thus scalable and decentralizable. • Large numbers of unmanned weapons distributed widely make large, expensive, centralized assets increasingly vulnerable (non-survivable). • Large numbers of unmanned weapons distributed widely are hard to counter since just some of them need to survive in order to inflict huge damage. • Yet our trillion-dollar defense budget is largely spent on manned systems that are very unlikely to survive a real conflict. • Even insofar as the US is procuring unmanned systems, its rate of evolution is way too slow. Unmanned systems evolve like consumer electronics, yet we have long procurement cycles (more than 5 times slower than China’s). To address the China threat we need to take advantage of our innovativeness to create stockpile of superior, strategic unmanned weapons systems that will deter them. • We cannot win a protracted war against China, given their superiority in manufacturing, and we don’t want such a war. But we can and want to deter them from attacking Taiwan, which controls the high-performance semiconductors our economy depends on. • Our big advantage is over China that we are better at innovating than China due to our political system and culture. They can make things at much larger scales, but we are much better at inventing new things. • The US’s superior innovation ability means that we can make superior weapons with huge cost-performance asymmetry compared to China’s. • These weapons need to be Strategic: can cripple China’s ability to wage war. (Ethan elaborates) • Given the time it takes to make weapons systems and the speed at which wars now start and end, we need to create a large stockpile of unmanned weapons systems—think tends of thousands—to deter China. If government procures weapons using standards of cost-effectiveness this can be done very cheaply. Government weapons spending must move as quickly as possible toward the standards of cost-effectiveness, scalability, and survivability. • Big picture, US weapons spending and procurement needs explicit standards to decide what to invest in. • Fundamentally the standard of weapons procurement must be cost-effectiveness: How much does it cost to have a given amount of effect in the expected environment? • Part of cost-effectiveness is scalability: We need to be able to produce sufficient units now and in an ongoing conflict. • Part of cost-effectiveness is survivability: Our weapons systems need to be able to by pass or handle enemy interference, which most legacy systems can’t. • If government can start allocating even $10 billion by these standards we can afford to build the stockpile superior unmanned weapons systems that will deter China from invading Taiwan.

Collin Rugg

@CollinRugg

Shawn Ryan astounded after 22-year-old CEO Ethan Thornton of Mach Industries, a defense tech startup, tells him he will give him a "miniature fighter jet." The Viper is a 6.5-foot vertical takeoff "miniature fighter jet" that can take off and land if needed. It reportedly costs under $100,000 per unit, can reach speeds of 600 mph, and has a range of several hundred miles. Insane. Video: @ShawnRyan762

Jason Miller

@JasonMiller

MUST-READ on @Mach_Industries & their young genius CEO @ethanrthornton! You’ve read about fellow Arsenal of Freedom trailblazers through reporting from @Axios @MikeAllen, @WashPost @JoshRogin & others, now read this @WSJ story to see what’s next! 🇺🇸 https://t.co/jDkyQjomCH

Arfur Rock

@ArfurRock

Mach is really flying. They've ~$200M of booked YTD, tracking to ~$550M+ for '26, up from effectively $0 '25. Wouldn't be surprised if there's another large round before EOY. Congrats to @Mach_Industries!

Manav

@Manavpod

Ethan Thornton dropped out of MIT at 19. His first product, a hydrogen weapon built with Home Depot parts, failed completely. Three years later, Mach Industries just closed a $300 million round at a $1.8 billion valuation, nearly four times what it was worth a year earlier. The thesis never changed: skip the multi-year, multi-million-dollar missile program and mass produce something cheap instead. Viper went from Army contract to first armed flight test in about six months. Industry standard is closer to four years. #MachIndustries #EthanThornton #DefenseTech

Tectonic

@tectonicdefense

.@Mach_Industries won a contract for the DIU’s Runway Independent Maritime & Expeditionary Strike (RIMES) program to develop Atlas, a new long-range drone designed to deliver fighter-sized munitions across hundreds of miles with minimal launch space. https://t.co/rlixCcxv7B

Ethan Thornton

Founder & CEO

Founder and CEO of Mach Industries. He dropped out of MIT at 19 to pursue hydrogen-powered defense systems after a hydrogen experiment convinced him gunpowder could be replaced, and now leads the company as its 22-year-old chief executive building autonomous weapons and aerospace systems.

Former AFWERX director and Divergent aerospace & defense CEO; leads company-wide strategy and growth.