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In this episode of From the Crow's Nest, host Ken Miller is joined by CX2 co-founders Nathan Mintz and Porter Smith to discuss the changing role of electronic warfare in international conflicts.
The conversation focuses on the role of EW in conflicts in the Middle East, as well as with the Russo-Ukrainian War. The founders discuss the implications of developing autonomous systems and the increased complexity of modern conflicts driven by a network of inexpensive, expendable assets such as kamikaze drones. Nathan and Porter alsoexplore the challenges and prospects of maintaining spectrum dominance, the integration of commercial development practices into defense technologies, and the necessity for agile, responsive innovation in military procurement and system development.
To learn more about today’s topics or to stay updated on EMSO and EW developments, visit our homepage.
Creators & Guests
What is From the Crows' Nest?
Featuring interviews, analysis, and discussions covering leading issues of the day related to electromagnetic spectrum operations (EMSO). Topics include current events and news worldwide, US Congress and the annual defense budget, and military news from the US and allied countries. We also bring you closer to Association of Old Crow events and provide a forum to dive deeper into policy issues impacting our community.
Ken Miller [00:00:09]:
Welcome to From the Crows' Nest, a podcast on electromagnetic spectrum operations or MSO. I'm your host, Ken Miller, director of advocacy and outreach for the Association of Old Crows. Thanks for listening. Before I introduce my guest, just a quick mention that next week for our subscriber only AOC member only episode, I will have friend and colleague John Knowles. He's the editor in chief of AOC's Journal of Electromagnetic Dominance, AOC's monthly publication. As our listeners know, whenever we have John on the show, it's always great conversation. It's a great time for our listeners to ask him questions. He is one of the most knowledgeable experts in our trade space. So if you want to take part in the live virtual studio audience, I believe we're recording at 12 noon next Tuesday, October 15th.
Ken Miller [00:00:54]:
If you're
Ken Miller [00:00:55]:
a member or a subscriber, look for an email from an AOC. If you're not, please become a subscriber or AOC member today. You can go to crow's dot org for more information. If you're just a listener and would like to use this opportunity just to ask John or myself any question or suggest any topic or comment, you may do that. We will try to get to as many of those as we can, and you so you can email me at host at from the crowsnest.org. Always enjoy hearing from our listeners. Like I said, even if it's not a question for an episode, or for a guest, it can just be a comment or suggest a topic or suggest a guest or anything. Happy to have that conversation. You can also message me through LinkedIn. My name is, of course, Ken Miller, so good luck with that unless you go with, go through AOC and track me down that way. But the AOC member only subscriber episodes are great way just to have a conversation on MSO. Of course, we record that. We're gonna record that at 12 noon next Tuesday, so it's a great topic to discuss over lunch, which is what we all wanna do anyway. So, hope you can join us and or at least, send send us your questions. We look forward to hearing from you. Alright. My guests for today are Nathan Mintz and Porter Smith. They recently contributed an op ed in the Wall Street Journal. I believe that was in early September entitled The Future of Warfare is Electronic. It caught our attention. It's spot on analysis, so I reached out and asked them to join me on the show, and here they are today. Nathan Mintz is a 20 year defense industry veteran. He is a lifetime AOC member and a 3 time startup founder and CEO. He is currently the CEO of CX2, which is building a new generation of EW products. Prior to this, he was the founding member or founding CEO of Appiris as as well as Spartan. Porter Smith has spent 10 years flying Ah 64 Apaches and MH 6 Little Birds before transitioning from military to serve as an autonomy team fellow at DIU. He then worked in Silicon Valley for a venture capitalist firm for 3 years investing in startup in the startup ecosystem space before leaving there to start to join Nathan in setting up CX2. It's a defense tech company focused on electromagnetic warfare. So with that, I welcome Nathan and Porter to From the Crows' Nest. Gentlemen, it's great to have you on the show.
Porter Smith [00:03:12]:
Thanks for having us, Ken.
Ken Miller [00:03:14]:
So we have a lot to get to in in our conversation today, but, we're recording this on October 1st, And just before we got into the studio here this afternoon, eastern time, obviously, news started to trickle out about the missile salvo, retaliation, from Iran into Israel. I think I think the latest reports were about 200, maybe a little less, but they're expecting more or another another salvo here in the future. I just got out of a a a live recording for subscribers discussing this. It was great. One of the first things I thought was wanting to have you gentlemen on to to get your perspective on this, and so I wanted to ask you kind of here on October 1st, what are you hearing and how does it how does this impact, you know, just kind of the security in the region and what does it mean moving forward with the with this escalation? I'll start with you, Nathan.
Porter Smith [00:04:05]:
Yeah. What I'm hearing is that, you know, the Israeli air defense system, is set up in several layers. You have the arrow threes, the arrow ones, David's Sling iron dome, and then finally the Patriot layer. It sounds like the Patriot lair was actually exercised, which means this one penetrated pretty far through the kind of standoff layers of the onion. I'm also kind of curious why we haven't seen any hits come through, why it was purely ballistic missiles, because in the last salvo that they sent out in April, there was something like 200, she headed, kamikaze drones that came across as well, and it doesn't seem like that has happened this time. So I don't know if it's that they've shipped all them to Russia for use against Ukraine or water, maybe they decide to have a limited escalation, but, there's a lot of diplomatic brinksmanship going on
Ken Miller [00:04:52]:
Yeah.
Porter Smith [00:04:53]:
Under the surface that I think we're only seeing kind of the top layer of play out, kinetically.
Ken Miller [00:04:58]:
You mentioned the different layers, and I I just wanna touch on that because I'm not familiar with how that how that's built out. Are you saying that these ballistic missiles were able to get through certain different layers, or they were have there been reports that the target the intended targets had been hit or is it still I know the last time they did this, using the kamikaze drones or whatever, it was, like, it was effective, like, 99%. Like, the defense was very effective in stopping that. So how is that different, or what could be the reasons for that?
Porter Smith [00:05:30]:
Porter actually was a pilot and had some training against Jared Defense, so he might have a little bit more con ops knowledge than I do, but, typically, when you fire service to air missiles at a at an incoming target, you launch them 2 at a time in case one fails, and then if it goes past the target, you'll use a flight termination system or other means. So at least that's how PAC 3 was set up. Think that likely the Israelis have something similar. They're they're also very sensitive to kind of projecting the ballistic path of where the missiles are gonna fall, and if they're falling somewhere that's considered noncritical, they won't spend the ordinance to to counter it, because they're kinda worried about, you know, if, you know, the obviously, if they blow it up in the air, the debris comes down, and I think the one casualty I saw was in Jericho, where debris had actually fallen on a Palestinian man. So, you know, they they wanna be conscientious that they're in a very dense environment and that debris can fall on anybody. But, I mean, Porter, I don't know if you have anything to add here.
Ken Miller [00:06:28]:
Porter, any anything to add to what Nathan just mentioned?
Porter Smith [00:06:32]:
Yeah. I mean, I think the larger theme here, and and this is, I think, become pretty obvious at this point, is that the nature of warfare has fundamentally changed. Mhmm. And here, you have quantity as a quality in and of itself. I mean, you can put the most advanced air defense system in the world out, and if you're putting 200 of something in rapid succession at it, it's probably gonna have a difficult time keeping up with with whatever the incoming projectiles are. And so I think at the end of the day, I don't have the details on how these rallies have responded yet. I've been following on Twitter like everybody else. But I I think at the end of the day, what you're seeing perhaps though is a concern over what if there's another salvo later or another salvo later and sort of triaging perhaps which targets you can protect and how.
Ken Miller [00:07:08]:
It would seem that every launch, every aggression, you know, you you gain intelligence. You know, here here's what worked. Here's what didn't. And maybe that's why they decided to go this route with the, ballistic missiles versus what they used last time based on how everything responded. So, you know, I mentioned that you at the beginning of the question, you know, this is an escalation, but, obviously, in this region, escalations are arguably on both sides. Their actions, this is supposedly in response to Israel's attack on Hezbollah leaders, which I guess they are still conducting operations. But when we talked the last time here just a a couple weeks ago, Israel had conducted just an extraordinarily eye opening operation where they were able to simultaneously detonate pagers as well as, push to talk radios in an effort to break down the communications of, of Hezbollah. So and that in of itself, we were talking that about that in the context of electronic warfare, and, you know, we talked a little bit about supply lines. So I wanna kind of bring that topic, that issue into this conversation because I think it just shows the complexity of the activities going on on both sides and the resources that are available. Obviously, with Israel, one of the world leaders in advanced defense technology, they're partnering our their allies, of course, US. And then on the other side, you have you don't have just Hezbollah Hamas and and and and the Houthis. You have Iran and Russia and Syria and so forth. So there are a lot of actors here. So looking at some of the recent activities over there, what does it say? Porter, you mentioned face of warfare is changing. What does it say about where we're going in particularly with EW?
Porter Smith [00:08:57]:
Well, there's one point to make early on is is I think philosophically, what we're seeing is this idea. We call it lighting up the Christmas tree. Mhmm. And this can occur in different ways tactically. But I think what you're seeing is that the employment of tactics where you have some sort of disposable asset, whether it's a pager or a one way drone or an introdable drone that's built to be, lost perhaps. And that asset is used in a forward deployed manner to cause your enemy to do something. Mhmm. And then your enemy responds, and you map out the responses. And so in the context of electronic warfare or air defense, you know, this is not completely dissimilar from the Cold War, except you have assets now that can be put forward and used in a way where if you lose them, it's okay. Mhmm. And so what that means for us, you know, for what we're building but also more broadly for the US defense industry is you want the ability to forward deploy things to cause your enemy to do stuff that you can then map out. And then once you map it, you can do something about it. And what that thing you decide to do can be kinetic or non kinetic. You can be a striker, it can be something else where you're just learning what they have and where it is. But I think this kind of broad tactical motion is something that we're gonna see repeatedly going into the future. And it can occur in the intelligence arena, like we saw in Lebanon, and it can also occur tactically, whether it's Shahed's and one way drones or other assets being used against, you know, military defenses.
Ken Miller [00:10:16]:
One of the things we talk a lot about here at the AOC and on podcast is, you know, a lot of times in EW, what you're oftentimes trying to do is is increase cost and latency in your adversary and making making them take that extra moment of time or having to spend that extra dollar and and push that up, and you're trying to decrease it for yourself. And it seems that, you know, this is this is a good example of how you're able to use, you mentioned, the the crystal put all these capabilities in there. And we'll we'll get to Ukraine in a second, but, yeah, it's a perfect example where, you know, you you can sometimes you have to have the choice of, do I shoot down a a $10,000 drone with a $1,000,000 missile? That cost pressure is is a real thing that we have to work through when it comes to warfighting.
Porter Smith [00:11:02]:
The Israelis, definitely taught a master class in, you know, cyber warfare and and electronic warfare in the last week or so. There's no question about that. I think the what what we're seeing is is that their enemies weren't prepared to answer them on the same terms, so they were forced to escalate sort of wildly and ineffectively. And it caused them to put a lot of pieces on the game board and bring forward that, you know, it's put them at a disadvantage. I think the term that I heard some of the diplomatic people use was escalation dominance.
Ken Miller [00:11:33]:
Mhmm.
Porter Smith [00:11:33]:
It was what the Israelis had managed to achieve.
Nathan Mintz [00:11:36]:
Well, there's an interesting kind of chess metaphor here, which is, and US needs to work on this a bit, in my opinion, but, the pawns are becoming much more important in how the overall game is played. And your ability to aggressively use pawns to cause reactions and then to put people in positions where you can, use other assets to to eliminate them is really important. And I think the Israelis have done a good job of that and, you know, again, different ways. I mean, I think pawns can be different things. But something moving forward I would keep an eye on is the ability of those pawns to have a lot of sensors on them Mhmm. Which historically might be only on more expensive centralized platforms. And so what you're seeing, I think, is a turn to more decentralized network architectures from these centralized architectures in a way that really changes, I think, from these centralized architectures in a way that really changes, I think, how the game itself is split.
Porter Smith [00:12:20]:
Yeah. Metcalfe's law has come to the battlefield, and we're now seeing that the power of the network and how those pieces are coordinated using cheap, extendable assets with, you know, relatively low performance sensors are able to do the job that previously required exquisite sensors that cost 100 of 1,000,000 of dollars at standoff ranges.
Ken Miller [00:12:39]:
You mentioned was it escalation dominance, or what was the the term?
Porter Smith [00:12:44]:
Yeah. Escalation dominance. And
Ken Miller [00:12:46]:
Well, Nathan, I I noticed on your I I don't know what they're called, but your board behind you that keeps changing, you
Porter Smith [00:12:52]:
A vestibular. Yeah. We had this installed last week, and it randomly puts messages out.
Ken Miller [00:12:58]:
I keep reading it because now it says deliver spectrum dominance, which, you know, obviously, you know, strikes home, to us, and so well played on that one to to distract me while we're interviewing with something that I agree with. But but this was the reason why we wanted to have you on the show because I first came across you from a editorial that you provided to Wall Street Journal, and it was basically the the future of, of warfare is electronic. And you speak mostly about, situation in Ukraine. You've been over to Ukraine numerous times, and it is a war of electromagnetic spectrum operations at first and foremost. And you discuss a little bit about the drones and how Russia has been able to respond to them, and and I know now recently there's Russia has launched a fiber optic drone. Recently. I can't I don't know if it's yesterday or today or something like that.
Porter Smith [00:13:53]:
Yeah. It's like the it's like the tow missile come again.
Ken Miller [00:13:56]:
Yeah. It it it seems to be the next iteration because of the complexity of electronic battle space that they're in. So, you know, tying in this idea of, obviously, congested, contested spectrum, the need to still, obviously, execute your mission, we need to deliver spectrum dominance first and foremost. It's it's the it's the one thing you can't you must have in place whether you if you need ground superiority, air superiority, cyber, whatever, you need to have spectrum first. So talk to us a little bit about kinda where you're coming from on this because, obviously, I read this, article, and I was like, here I I agree with everything you just said.
Porter Smith [00:14:33]:
So I think the US, historically, we've invested a lot in electronic warfare, at least in the last 10 to 15 years, as mostly a self protect mechanism for exquisite systems. We do have, you know, SIGINT assets like Rivet Joint and other things, that typically operate at standoff distances and are mostly based around the concept of intelligence preparation of the battlefield to give us that electronic order of battle because the thought process was, you know, we're gonna have to go if we go all the way back to the cold war, you know, we're gonna have to storm the Folda Gap, and there's going to be these interlocking layers of integrated air defense systems that are handing off between the the early warning radars and the intercept, you know, the ground control intercept radars, etcetera, and we're going to peel back that onion for a combination of standoff jamming, stealth, you know, countermeasures, anti radiation missiles, etcetera. And it's all been very blue sky oriented. Now, you know, fast forward 30 years, we're seeing that same thing play out in what's now being kind of colloquially called the air literals in Ukraine and Russia, where basically we have no one has air dominance, and so people are looking for where they can jockey, and it's it's it's 1500 feet below. And it turns out the systems you need to operate there are significantly lower in price and are able to be fielded in much larger quantities than the systems that we have that are in the blue sky, you know, in in in the blue sky, you know, defensive offensive counter scenarios. As a result of that, what we're seeing is that the the one commonality between those two is the spectrum, and it's it's being able to ensure that you have data link control, situational awareness for where your where your unmanned systems are going, because the war's gone fully autonomous. We've got guys who grew up, you know, playing on Xboxes and Nintendo's that are putting on AR goggles and and driving these first person view drones in on these 50 kilometer kamikaze missions, and that's on both sides. Right? It's not just the Ukrainians or the Russians, and they're doing this at a scale. I mean, you know, that they just had a guy on the Wall Street Journal named EO callsign Darwin. They're launching 40 of these things a day with 1 pilot.
Nathan Mintz [00:16:46]:
Mhmm.
Porter Smith [00:16:46]:
And so we have to we have to recognize that reality that we've gone from, you know, one plane going up there loitering for a couple of hours, you know, launching 4 to 6 guided bombs or missiles and then tanking and coming home to this idea of these one way kamikaze drones that are coming out of that kind of cadence. And to give you an idea of scale, the Ukrainians are gonna build about a 1000000 drones this year. The Chinese are gonna build about 7,000,000 drones this year, about 20,000 a day. The Russians are probably gonna do 4 or 500,000. The US, I think, will do 20,000 drones this year. So we're way behind in this, and it's important that we catch up and we figure out how to secure the spectrum that will be the underlying, you know, supply it's as important to the 21st century battlefield as supply lanes and logistics for the 20th. So, you know, Porter, I don't know if you have anything to add to that.
Ken Miller [00:17:38]:
Porter, as from the your operational background, I mean, obviously, you have a a unique perspective on on the importance of spectrum dominance. Anything to add?
Nathan Mintz [00:17:46]:
Yeah. I mean, there's there's a couple undercurrents that are happening right now that I think are very interesting. So the first is is all platforms of the warfare are going from manned to unmanned. And then I think a little bit we're seeing the the inklings of this now, but it'll develop more in the future. They'll eventually go autonomous. And then you'll go to networked autonomous where you have fleets that are learning from each other and and, you know, tactically maneuver. When you do that, drones are very similar to cell phones. In order for them to have value, you're gonna wanna pipe a video feedback to to human operators or you're gonna want the drones to communicate with each other laterally. That requires, some sort of signal. And so in my mind, there's two sides to this coin. There's a defensive side where due to jamming, which is the easiest way to prevent drones from maneuvering on the battlefield right now in this environment, you need the world's strongest subsystems to not just survive but thrive in these harsh electronic warfare environments. On the offensive side of the house, it presents new opportunities. New there's a new way of seeing the worlds and this is kind of a little bit of the thesis of our company, which is everything moving forward is going to emit. Every Russian tank right now has a 900 megahertz FPV jammer on it. Mhmm. Now, when those 900 megahertz FPV jammers are on, you're probably gonna want something up in the air that can put a fingerprint on the battlefield that lights up everything out there in the 900 megahertz frequency bands. And then you could slew a camera onto those data points and see things that maybe you wouldn't know were there before. And so I think one of the ways that we think about this is is a lot of the electronic warfare stuff has gotten democratized to the point where I like to think there's a nuance now with electronic warfare and electromagnetic warfare and maybe that's pedantic, maybe that doesn't really matter. But the way I think about it is, is you have a new way of seeing the world now almost akin to night vision 50 60 years ago where if you're gonna fight now your lowest levels of ground troops need the ability to understand what frequencies are clean and what frequencies are dirty because they're gonna be launching their own drones. And then, on the backside of that, they need to figure out, okay, where is the enemy's, assets that are hurting us? Because a visceral experience that I had with the Ukrainians was seeing what a Pole 20 1 jammer or other, you know, GPS jammers can do to your ability to do anything on the battlefield. And if you can't find those things, fingerprint them and then put fires on them immediately, you're gonna have a really tough time doing anything else today. The last point that I'll make, the US and I don't know if if this point is fully understood by folks that have had to live it before. The US, we have like a very sophisticated, orchestra of fires that is very dependent on a lot of different variables. So if you had an air stack, for example, in Afghanistan that has an a 10, f 16, or an Apache, or an MQ 9 predator, or other other assets overhead, there's a lot that goes into that there's maintenance requirements there's piloting requirements there's weather requirements there's refueling on all the fighters that no one talks about that's extremely expensive and a whole choreography in and of itself and what we're seeing now on the battlefield is the ability to create an organic fire sack for the ground force where you can put up your own sensing drone and find things 5 to 10 kilometers out. And then based on loitering munitions advances, you can put up essentially your own loitering hellfire missiles to do something about it. So, from a first principles perspective, if we think about all the stuff that goes into having a fighter jet or an attack helicopter put a missile or a bomb on a target and everything that went into that, you short circuit a lot of that if you give the ground force the ability to carry their own munition into battle and then launch it and strike and target in similar ways without the incredibly long tail that's required of those manned aviation assets. And that pains me as an ex aviator to say that, but it's just the way the world's moving right now. It's something that I think we'll have to accept.
Ken Miller [00:21:17]:
I think that, you know, when you look at how technology has been advancing, as you mentioned, it's going to cause a a tremendous shift in how we purchase the next generation or even, upgrade the current existing generation of defense technology. I mean, it's going to be seismic shifts or potentially seismic shifts in what we what we build and what we have to field in the next 10 to 15 years. And we're basically we have 2 major conflicts right now and and potentially another one sitting out in in in the near future in the end of into Paycom that are giving us some lessons about here's what you need today just to win, and we're being proven right. But they're giving us clues as to where we need to be 15 years, and it some it oftentimes feels like, are we on the right path to that? So you you mentioned some of these trends that you see. Talk a little bit about where we're at or where you where we're at in terms of really truly understanding this is the path that we're on and where we need to go.
Porter Smith [00:22:20]:
Yeah. So so I think the real big for me came when we were in Ukraine, and we went and visited the people that were, you know, actually there at the front lines, and they told us how they were fighting the war. And in the US, I spent a lot of time back in my time in big aerospace in requirements working groups and threat working groups, and we always worried about the highest dealing with the most highest performance, exquisite. We used to joke it was the arc of the covenant jammer that you'd have to defeat your with your missile or or your radar or something like that. And here, you literally have $1500 barrage noise jammers, and they're just giving them to every 3rd or 4th soldier. And instead of you being at some standoff distance where you're trying to deal with that or, you know, coming and homing in, you've got now a drone that's 50 feet over the deck that's trying to deal with that. And he's trying to not just fight through, the enemy jamming, but the friendly jamming. And that's actually been one of the frustrations that a lot of US drone manufacturers and stuff have had as they've gone over there has been that, you know, they didn't assume that they'd be launching in an environment where there'd be GPS deny, you know, jamming and everything. They thought they might get a freebie to get their timing and everything set up before they launched. And so they've had a lot of problems, and the Ukrainian stuff is just much more robust in that respect. It's simpler. It's it's, you know, it's it's evolved in this this harsh environment. Right? And so, you know, understanding that we're not going to be dealing necessarily with exquisite systems, at least not right away, but we're going to be dealing with lots of cheap systems in our face. It's sort of like the, you know, Stalin's revenge. You know, Stalin said that quantity has equality all of its own. That's exactly what we're facing with these swarms of attritable mass, both on a defensive and an offensive scale. And Ukraine is a perfect example of that. And, you know, god forbid we end up in a fight in the Taiwan Strait. We're almost certainly going to face the same thing, and, you know, it doesn't take much imagination. You go look at these 10,000 drone swarm shows that the Chinese have going on, you know, on a on a daily basis in in their port cities. And you go, okay. Well, you know, what happens when that gets kinetic and offensive? Right? Mhmm. So we need to be prepared for that. We need to to build systems that can counter mass and scale with mass and scale.
Ken Miller [00:24:36]:
Yeah. So so we're working on, on building an episode that'll pipe it'll probably come out next month, but we're talking about, like, the reform efforts of the PPBE process, the planning, programming, budgeting, and execution process. That's a 2 year funding cycle for DOD, Congress, and to get new technologies. And, you know, as as you're reading up on this, there there's so many points of potential failure for new technology that it runs into that can slow down the development of of innovation. How can we and I think this really gets into your new company that you're starting up, but how do we overcome these pitfalls that you highlighted, you know, or or reach the shift that we need to that you mentioned, when we have a process that at its shortest point is over 2 years and is filled with multiple points where innovation can fail? How do we even begin to overcome that problem?
Porter Smith [00:25:37]:
So I think we need to embrace commercial time scales and commercial development practices here. One anecdote I'll give from the front lines, one of our advisers helps a number of Ukrainian drone companies, that are out there dealing with every change in TTPs or tactics, techniques, and procedures that the Russians put forward. And they're, in some cases, using commercial CICD processes to push as many as 6 software updates a day to their drones. And right now, there's nothing of comparison to that in the DOD process. So, you know, we have to start thinking about when we do programming and planning, like you said, the PBE process, how do we make these programs so that we buy an asset that's largely reprogrammable? We're taking advantage of software defined radios. We're taking advantage of, you know, software defined hardware in some cases with stuff that's extremely modular. Can be snapped in and snapped out and reconfigured quickly with with more of kind of a single purpose in mind rather than building multifunctional systems that take forever to field like I did at some points in my career. How do we take those elements and build into the budget process that the first iteration of the system, it's more like, you know, the minimum viable product or the minimum marketable product, and that's gonna need to be constantly iterated upon from a software and hardware perspective, which, you know, if you think about how you plan out a program right now, it kinda looks like a bell curve with a with a tail to the right is kind of how most development occurs, and it needs to be a little bit more flatter and sustained with kind of the idea of building systems that have these quality attributes like extensibility and scalability and and evolvability that are built into them from the get go. And I think it's gotta take the whole industry a while to get our head wrapped around it, but we have the luxury of being able to audit this war in Ukraine and see what's working there and what isn't, and we should really take advantage of it and think about how we're gonna change our acquisition structure going in to the next 10 to 20 years.
Ken Miller [00:27:31]:
So, Porter, kind of building on that in terms of getting your head around it, you know, you you brought up the analogy of the chessboard and how pawns are becoming a lot more important to the game, so to speak. If you change the the meaning of what the pawn can do, even the greatest chess master today would have trouble adapting. So how can we get our minds around the change that we see happening in the battlefield? How do we can we get our minds around that and make the changes so that we know how to play the right game when it comes to innovation?
Nathan Mintz [00:28:04]:
Well, I mean, we've had a lot of talks recently with various folks in industry and on the political side as well in Capitol Hill, and I think a lot of very smart people are thinking about it the right way and recognize the need for change within the Department of Defense. So there's some great organizations out there. DIU is one of them. I mean, I'll use them as an example. They're they're, dropping these open solicitations that I think from a startup perspective is very important because what it says is here's a fair and open playing field. We're asking for these broad requirements. It's a fairly low barrier to entry like a 12 deck slide or 12 slide slide deck and come bring us your solutions and then we're gonna go through them and we're gonna do open testing and we're gonna see kind of who wins. And then we'll feed you some money after that if it goes well and then we'll continue down the line because we've already lined up some customers that are interested in this tech. So I think structurally looking at things like that that create the incentives for startups to have a place to go and compete is very important. The the other thing that I would take a look at though outside of that is what can we do to create a new reformed PPV structure, for example, that also incentivizes, re competing. Right now, the way things work is you kind of get a program of record in and it's just running for forever. And the truth is, is the new tech development cycles now, I mean, it's almost like congressional elections. They need to be re competed every 2 years. You know? Maybe that's a little too short and you bump it out to 3 or 4 years, but I think building that into the process is gonna be very important. The last thing that I'll just mention, from a startup lens, because we've dealt with this a lot, everyone talks about modularity and modularity is gonna be very important. So you want to create open interfaces where if you have a drone, for example, you can plug and play any payload you want into it. That sounds great in theory, but you have to actually enforce those open interfaces with companies that are looking to capture that entire ecosystem by virtue of owning the hardware, which is the drone platform. And the thing that I think is really important there is is a couple different things, but one of them would be when you're putting forth that contract, you want the ability to also test payloads and you want to be able to test things in the right environment. So if you're putting forward a drone program of record, I would say from from this state forward, you probably want that drone to be flying in heavily, heavily contested electronic warfare environments to see how it actually does. The other thing is modularity is great to a point. I think the F 35 kind of bore this out. I forget the paper that was written on it but there was a study done on the marine variant of the F 35 as B12 capabilities. And I think the conclusion was it would have been cheaper to just net develop a completely different aircraft than to try to change that aircraft as it was for the Air Force and the other variants, for the RainCorps VTOL version. The same thing can also be true here. Modularity is great to a point something that we deal with is when you're installing the antenna packages on a drone The way the drone is structured matters. If you have large metal struts right in front of antennas, you can't just pop them on and off like you can a camera and have it work the same. And so I just think of it as a little bit there's an inflection point with all these projects where at some point you might just need a different platform and it's okay to recognize that and it's okay to have a menu of options.
Porter Smith [00:30:58]:
A 100%. There's always this when you do get into the meta architecture of how we build systems, you know, there's this push and pull between monolithic and modular, like he said. And and I think for a while there, particularly because there was such a push for modular open systems architecture and the thought process that we're gonna put a missile on a tube for 30 years, and we're just gonna bring a new tape out every year or so and upgrade it. And I think we need to embrace the fact that that the shelf life realistically with modern electronics for these things is probably more like 5 years, and we need to think about how do we build factories that can that can quickly turn up and turn down these capabilities as we need them rather than thinking we're just going to stockpile this stuff forever and keep it in stores. Because like what we saw in Ukraine, you know, we brought we handed them, you know, Excalibur guided, you know, GPS guided artillery shells, and we we handed them, you know, HIMARS and a lot of other systems that were basically rendered obsolete the moment the Russians brought in the next phase and and evolved and adapted and brought GPS jammers, like, pull, you know, pull 20 ones and others to the battlefield. And, so so embracing that these systems probably have a shorter shelf life than we think, so we don't need to make them super modular and upgradable. They need to be focus built, and, really, the time to field matters more than the relevance, the time in which they're relevant.
Ken Miller [00:32:20]:
So both of you gentlemen, you you have tremendous backgrounds, you know, of and and we we shared a little bit earlier, but you are you I just wanna get a little bit more context for listeners. You're you're both partnering on a new startup, c x CX 2, and you're you're bringing your wealth of experience as as entrepreneurs, as as operators, in Porter's case, and your your background in in in DOD, contracting and so procurement and so forth. Tell us a little bit about what c x two and what what kind of prompted you to begin this company, and what do you hope to get to get out of it? How and how does it will it affect the conversation that we're having today in terms of helping US and its partners, you know, achieve dominant spectrum dominance.
Porter Smith [00:33:04]:
So I think what, you know, CX 2 was born for a lot of lessons learned that we had from observing how things were change how how the nature of warfare was changing in the Middle East and in and Ukraine, particularly with a lot of firsthand experience. And Porter's been over there, what is it Porter, 4 times I think you've been over there. I've only been over there, you know, once. But, you know, seeing how the nature of war has changed, and we said, you know what? What we could see is systems that are at the tactical edge that are able to, you know, provide offensive EW capabilities at cost numbers that make sense given the scale at which unmanned autonomous warfare is occurring of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of these systems being fielded over the course of the campaign or even 1,000,000. We wanted systems that could that could fingerprint the battlefield and provide both kinetic and nonkinetic options to neutralize cheap systems of that scale, and being able to provide, that to the warfighter rapidly and affordably. And, I mean, Porter, I don't know if you have anything to add.
Nathan Mintz [00:34:04]:
I I just kind of viewed it as a once in a lifetime opportunity, Ken, to be honest, because I'm a huge, student of the history of warfare. Nathan is too. It's one of the things that we connected on early. And I think, warfare fundamentally changes maybe once every century, maybe twice a century. And we're going through one of those fundamental changes right now where the humans are being replaced by, you know, manned autonomous systems. And I think there's just gonna be a cascade of effects that result from that. And it just was very clear to me that, the US, in my opinion, for deterrence purposes, needs to master, these capabilities in this craft. And I think that there's some, wonderful companies that have already been built like Anduril and others that have done a a great job of kind of, getting out ahead of this. And I think there's room for plenty more. And so what we're laser focused on are building those next gen platforms, that the US will need moving forward for 21st century warfare.
Porter Smith [00:34:58]:
There was an op ed. I think Jay Knowles wrote it in the last a couple months ago and and Jed that talked about the hedge force and the need for a hedge force. We're here to provide that mid tier acquisition hedge force for electronic warfare.
Ken Miller [00:35:10]:
As you begin this venture or as you're in within this venture right now, you both are entrepreneurs and you've had other successful efforts in the past. What are some of the things that you've learned specifically in terms of starting a new company in the defense sector? And this what are some of the things that you have learned that you are now prepared to see a little bit more clearly in terms of and that you can tell us to help future innovators out there as they wanna also become help fill the space and become one of the many companies that we need to fill that that, level of, innovation.
Porter Smith [00:35:48]:
So, obviously, you know, I I have done the this is my first rodeo. This is the 3rd company. The first one, EPRIS, I think you had Andy Lowry, who's the current CEO, on on here a few months ago, Cyber Microwave, and then I did another one in automotive, a radar, actually, called Spartan. And, that was kinda what opened my eyes to just the scale of electronics manufacturing that's current in the private sector and how, you know, the defense has become almost a rounding error compared or it has become a rounding error in a lot of respects towards those 1 compared to the quantities you see in the private sector. So, I think the first piece is is that the first time around, we maybe relied a little too much on, you know, sort of traditional defense know how, not realizing that a lot of it was rooted in processes and stuff that even the DOD itself was, starting to recognize as somewhat obsolete. So taking into account more, you know, commercial software best practices, commercial agile engineering, and that sort of thing. And then I think also recognizing that intimate relationships with your customers early and building that trust matters more than just going after random SBIRs that are kinda related to what you're doing. So, you know, embracing tools like Kratos and others, really getting out there and engaging with the customer and making sure you give them what they want quickly and iteratively, and, building that trust and then also building that that trust with all the stakeholders, including legislative and executive stakeholders as well. Early on, I think, you know, 7, 8 years ago, the only people that had really built a, a defense for aerospace Unicorn were Palatir and SpaceX. And since then, we've had several instances. I got to be a part of one of them, where we've gotten we've gotten these large scale companies that have brought new systems into play, and we understand how to kinda marry the political, the Pentagon, and, the the industry and VC stakeholders and get them all together and get them in a room and playing as a band kind of in harmony. Right? So we've gotten a lot better about that, and I think that, you're gonna see a lot more start ups that are able to scale and hopefully provide more competition in the space, working with existing players, as much as we can because we can't throw the baby out with the bathwater here, to really redefine the US fighting force so that our teeth stay sharp and we stay relevant in the fight, and provide good deterrence against our adversaries.
Ken Miller [00:38:08]:
Porter, I'll I'll give you the last word if you had anything to add to to Nathan.
Nathan Mintz [00:38:12]:
I just think it's really important to build capabilities versus features sometimes. I think oftentimes features are important, but you need to provide an end to end capability to the Department of Defense. And to do so, it's it's tough. I mean, it requires money. It requires smart engineers. It requires knowing the customer very well. And figuring out if you wanna build something new, how that needs to become a requirement for the customer that might not be today. Right? Because a lot of the requirements are baked in old ways of doing things. And if you're building something new, the requirements have to change for you to fit into that, into that defense tech pyramid, so to speak. And so those are things that we're very focused on, but, you know, excited about the opportunities to come.
Ken Miller [00:38:49]:
Well well, gentlemen, thank you so much for taking time to join me here on From the Croesenestus. It's great to talk with you a couple weeks ago, have you on the show. Hope to have you back on again. You're right you're you're right on the forefront of, you know, everything that we are advocating here on From the Crows' Nest and AOC, and so just really greatly appreciate your insight.
Porter Smith [00:39:07]:
Thank you, Ken. As a, almost lifetime member of the AOC, I'm thrilled
Nathan Mintz [00:39:12]:
to be all here. Thanks, Ken. Hopefully, we'll see you in December at the AOC conference.
Ken Miller [00:39:16]:
Absolutely, you will. And I'll probably I may even have you on the podcast then too. So it was great talking with you. Thanks, Nathan. Thanks, Porter. That will conclude this episode of From the Crows' Nest. I'd like to thank Nathan and Porter for joining me. Also, don't forget to review, share, and subscribe to this podcast. We always enjoy hearing from our listeners, and you can also do that by emailing me at host at from the crow's nest dot org. That's it for today. Thanks for listening.