The Exchanges

Q And you know, there's been talk a lot of obviously not just drones, but drone swarms, dozens, hundreds, thousands of AI enabled battle networked, you know, drones, you know, a tradable units acting in coordination. We're trying to build versions of these obviously in different companies. What makes HPM a viable solution against the swarms? Like you can turn off all of them at once.

A Well, that's the thing. It's a wider area effect technology. So where you have lasers, you think of a laser has a very, very, uh, tiny little beam that needs to hit one target at a time and burn through that target and then disrupt it. Uh, a microwave system, especially at the frequencies we're using, can be very broad and spread. So we can spread All of that microwave into the atmosphere and everything in that section of the atmosphere would be affected by that electromagnetic radiation. So it lends itself just by the sheer nature of what we've brought to kind of the army and then the DOD at large. Just the sheer nature of it allows for that, uh, combating of a parallel set of threats. And when you combine that with some of the big data techniques that you see in Automatic driving and other types of industries like that. You have a sensor system that can see hundreds or thousands of things at the same time. AI that can drive basically an effector that can very quickly determine, okay, here are these drones, hundred drones coming from this direction. Hit them with a wall of these frequencies and these waves. Here's another set of drones coming from this direction. Next, shoot the beam over there in a microsecond and put another wall on top of those.

AI assessment note: “It's a wider area effect technology. So where you have lasers”

Q And obviously there's some really amazing innovations here. Like why else make the jump from defense prime to Startup. Are there other aspects of the primes that are frustrating? Are there more positive things in startups? Like how do you, how do you see it differently?

A Well, I, I think primes are exactly what they're, uh, You know, structured to be. I mean, they're structured to be, I would say, an offshoot nearly of the DOD, of the Department of Defense, of the Pentagon. Everything they do is tethered to, kind of, direction from the DOD, and so they do very little, like, internal commercial innovation. There isn't a lot of internal research and development dollars spent on pure innovation that isn't tethered to a DARPA Or some other type of program that the military, uh, kind of comes up with, and that's fine, and that's good, and that works. It works for, uh, all of this defense era up until today, but now there's been like a scratch of the record, if you will, and everything's gone to all stop with this new type of warfare, uh, that we see so prevalent across the world today, and it's only growing.

AI assessment note: “they do very little, like, internal commercial innovation.”

Q So knowing that these things are working so well, people are excited. Are you just, are you just, you're building a lot more of them before they're even bought? Like what are we building right now as a company?

A Yeah, that's part of the Neo prime playbook. So we right now built ahead before we had anything on order. So when the army gave us a contract, they said, see if we can deliver these in a couple years, two and a, it was a two and a half years actually. We delivered four systems in 15 months. I mean, just unheard of. 15 months, four full systems to the Army. Now they're looking at sort of things that could improve the lethality, the range. You talked about wanting to reach out to miles. Yes, absolutely, we can do that, and so now we're basically rapidly on our own money, on, on money that we are self-investing in. We're building basically systems that I call it at a zero, you know, compared to our baseline system. Everything that we can shoot at, uh, let's say a hundred yards, we could shoot at a thousand yards with the system that we're building now. So a lot of work is going into that system because we think that system's going to be effective against the longer range targets. Still in the short range air picture, but when we're talking the long range, short range, we're talking 10 kilometers, you know, five, six miles, and that type of a range.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, that's part of the Neo prime playbook. So we right now built ahead”

Q the primes. They're very good at it. They are by far the most lobbyists. They kind of have the structure of how it all works. Uh, you know, a lot of us think more money should be going into some of these new innovative areas that terrify and deter our enemies. Like, what does that, what does that look like if you're in Congress and you're trying to fix this?

A Yeah, that's a, that's a great question. I think the one thing that I think We could stand to do better at, and not to say that we haven't been doing a little in this direction, but more money that is programmed to be flexible in the budget in year. Uh, you know, each year there's a several billion dollars, let's say, of money that they can actually do anything flexibly with, the DOD. You know, everyone talks about the 800, uh, some odd billion dollar budget that the DOD D has, but, uh, what people don't say that when you boil it down to what actually is reprogrammable, it's a tiny fraction of that. It's like, I think the army, uh, has maybe a hundred and fifty million, a billion, I'm sorry, a hundred and fifty billion dollars or less, uh, to do anything with each year to year, and then of that amount, there's a tiny fraction that isn't already, uh, Sort of the big programs are record, the big primes, the big traditional method. There's just single digit billions at most, at most, and, uh, or things like AppFit is the right idea. AppFit's just several hundred million, you know. Uh, DIU this year, they got a billion dollars. Incredible. That's the right direction. I think more money needs to be placed in a more flexible, flexible spending structure year to year Because otherwise I'm being, again, held up by the pace of bureaucracy.

AI assessment note: “more money that is programmed to be flexible in the budget in year”

Q me that, you know, there's all these really important potential weapons being developed in space. There's obviously other things we're doing with space that are critical for, for warfare and otherwise. Could you, could you, could you put something paired with a satellite and, and then turn off an incoming missile trying to destroy it and protect the satellite too? Is that the kind of thing we should be doing?

A Yeah, that is a wonderful, ah, you know, we started the ground and we've moved to air with the Air Force and we've had preliminary discussions with Space Force, but I've had a really interesting discussion just three days ago about this, and this fellow that knows a lot about space domain awareness, Said, you know, Andy, the satellites where they're at today are just like an NFL line that lines up before the whistle blows. Soon as a war happens, those satellites go every which direction, perform different functions that you don't even think. I was blown away. I had no idea that's what was going on up there. If they're saying that the next war, apart from this asymmetrical drone and swarm stuff we're talking about, the next war will be determined by space. And how you dominate in space. And so today we're building hunter killer satellites, seeker satellites that fly around when one of those things happen. And to be able to put an HPM in space, you can think of it in terms of hypersonics. You can think about it in terms of what the Chinese are doing or thinking about as far as their ballistic missiles go and being able to go, uh, in route or in course correction, uh, to targets and stuff. Well, we need to be able to be in space In order to intercept those things as they go. And the good thing about space is because we're using, uh, electromagnetic energy, the vacuum of a space ac…

AI assessment note: “to be able to put an HPM in space... intercept those things as they go”

Q So it's a big deal. And to tell us a little bit more about working with the DOD, like what's, what's frustrating, what's encouraging, like, like, is it, is it easier that you think than it was to break through here than 20 years ago? Like what's, what's it been like?

A Uh, my experiences lend well, uh, cause they've done similar activities in the prime and now outside I've been able to talk the language. And understand kind of the directionality, uh, that they want to take it. But back when I was in prime, in the primes, we didn't have the adaptive acquisition framework. So what I would say is really good about the DOD and the Pentagon is under, uh, Secretary Ash Carter, they implemented what they called an adaptive acquisition framework that has, uh, contract types called OTAs, has, uh, pathways to Production called MTAs, mid-tier acquisitions, and these different ways of approaching, ah, engaging with Department of Defense has sprung the basically potential for neoprimes to become something significant and become a player in sort of the mix that the DoD can draw from. Now, why do we need neoprimes? Like, what has caused this sudden need for us to say, hey, we would really like Silicon Valley Uh, to come in and help us with a bunch of our problems. I would say two major things have happened. One is the proliferation of this new class of warfare called, I called it back 10 years ago, asymmetrical and irregular. Today, you would probably not call it that. You'd call it something more, ah, down the fairway, as far as how warfare has evolved. And how that was represented back then, and how it's represented today, is that it would be marked by A …

AI assessment note: “So what I would say is really good about the DOD and the Pentagon”