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"Building the Base" - an in-depth series of conversations with top entrepreneurs, innovators, and leaders from tech, financial, industrial, and public sectors.
Our special guests provide their unique perspectives on a broad selection of topics such as: shaping our future national security industrial base, the impact of disruptive technologies, how new startups can increasingly contribute to national security, and practical tips on leadership and personal development whether in government or the private sector.
Building the Base is hosted by Lauren Bedula, is Managing Director and National Security Technology Practice Lead at Beacon Global Strategies, and the Honorable Jim "Hondo" Geurts who retired from performing the duties of the Under Secretary of the Navy and was the former Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research, Development & Acquisition and Acquisition Executive at United States Special Operations Command.
Lauren Bedula (01:11.628)
Welcome back to Building the Base. We're very excited to be here today with Congressman Pat Harrigan. Congressman Harrigan has a very interesting career, having served in the Army Special Forces. He's also an engineer and now spending time in Congress representing North Carolina's 10th congressional district. Sir, thanks so much for joining us today.
Pat Harrigan (01:33.114)
Hey, it's great to be here with you, both Lauren and Hondo.
Hondo (01:37.005)
Congressman, we like to kind of start out telling our listeners kind of the origin story, kind of where'd you come from and, you know, what took you from the battlefields of Afghanistan to the battlefields of D.C., so to speak.
Pat Harrigan (01:50.728)
That's a pretty good way to start. Hondo, you and I have a bunch of mutual acquaintances that due to the nature of what we both used to do, we'll leave nameless here. But it's actually neat to be on a podcast with you. I've heard your name many, many times. Had never had the opportunity to meet you. But I'll kind of just hop into it real quick. As you said, I came out of West Point in the Special Forces and ended up starting a company with my wife stationed down at Fort Bragg. I was in 3rd Special Forces Group and we kind of started a weapons and munitions company where line components we would contract those components out from private industry and we would put those components on the floors of large firearms manufacturers for their production lines. And so we ended up moving a lot of parts into the firearms industry before I actually ever left active duty service and the business kind of grew to the point where I needed to get out of the military in order to do it full time. And we purchased a 120,000 square foot manufacturing facility out in western North Carolina, just west of Hickory. And we have been building our company ever since. I got out of the military at the very end of 2016 and just kind of kept acquiring companies and growing, building partnerships and actually doing domestic manufacturing here, pulling some of that manufacturing in and expanding it from across the country. It's been a wonderful journey of getting to understand how to make things, it well in this country, do it with fully robotic automation, but also some fantastic folks that we've hired along 65 employees now and just some of the best Americans that I've ever had the privilege of working with and I came and got kind of the spark to join in the political foray up here in Washington during the fall of Afghanistan. just I really couldn't believe how we had leadership in this country fail this world so badly.
I genuinely believe and have always believed that when America fails to lead, the world burns. And with the fall of Afghanistan, the way that we let it end, we actually condemned the world to conflict. And so I took a look and took stock and said, well, if I want my kids to live in kind of the same world that I grew up in, to have the same opportunity or to give them that shot at having more opportunity than I had rather addressing in the direction the world is going. We've got to change things up in Washington DC. We've got to get Democrats the heck out of DC. And I decided to run for Congress and ended up being, you know, one of the dogs that caught the mail truck. So here we are now sitting on the House Armed Services Committee, sitting on science, space and technology. We just got through NDAA markup last week. Got 17 out of 18 of our strategic priorities through markup. That's a huge testament to my staff and my team. We've really started to make a mark up here. Back onto the right tracks and I'm very privileged to be here.
Hondo (05:10.993)
So as a young kid growing up, you, you know, was military always a thing or politics always a thing or did it just kind of seem like the right thing at the time? What was a young Congressman Harrigan doing running around as a kid?
Pat Harrigan (05:27.484)
Well Hondo, young congressman, was a little old Pat Harrigan who thought he might play basketball one day in the NBA. I got a 6'7'' frame that ended up not going into basketball, but ended up going into parachuting and gunfighting. And it was not always a calling of mine truthfully. I didn't have anybody in my family that was former military except for my grandfather who was in World War two he was indeed a he was in the Battle of the Bulge and had a Pretty incredible journey and story in his own right I mean he started as a private and ended up as a first lieutenant by the end of the war largely through attrition and You know, I just it always impressed upon me. I could talk to my grandfather and in his later years he had dementia, but he could recite to the tiniest little detail what happened on D-Day or what happened, two hours before and that always left an impression on me that wow what a formative part of his life he made a huge difference for the trajectory of the world and certainly our country and if I'm able I should probably go serve and so that's that's where the initial interest in you know going to West Point really started.
Hondo (06:54.191)
Yeah. So from being a lieutenant on the battlefield now, what's, you know, your fresh in, what's, what's like your first week as a freshman congressman? Like, what is that? You know, is is it like showing up in the military and, know, enthusiastic, but not nearly knowing where you're going or painting a little picture for us? We're going to get back to your entrepreneurship here in a bit, but you know, it's your, it's your first week. got the new pin, you get sworn in. I don't know how to lay that out for me.
Pat Harrigan (07:22.086)
You know, it's kind of like going into your first couple days as a young butter bar, second lieutenant in the military, right? Somebody says, hey, you need to go down to the S1 shop. And you're like, what is that? Where is that? I don't even know, you know, left from right. But once you start to get to understand how the different machinations work and you understand everything has its place the way that it's been organized and you can work within the system then you can start to change it and so that process is a it's a slow one certainly I think the legislative process is intentionally a very slow one right constitutionally it's supposed to be very hard to get things done up here but once you kind of learn the cadence you kind of understand how you need to move and where you need to flow in order to accomplish what you believe is in the best interest of both your district and the country. And it's been a real treat getting to learn that process and certainly only six months in. I'm still learning. I can tell you that after serving seven and a half years in the military, I was still learning on my last day of service on my way out. And I think that I continue with that mindset here, however long this journey lasts for me.
Hondo (08:35.761)
At least that didn't make you shave your head going in, I guess. So, you heard that going for you.
Pat Harrigan (08:38.012)
That's right.
Lauren Bedula (08:38.545)
Well, I want to go back to Hondo's point about your entrepreneurial spirit. It's so cool to hear about your company, especially in the manufacturing realm. just got back from Detroit. I was at the Reindustrialize Conference and it was so exciting to see just all of the energy around. Yeah, yeah. So what gave you the idea to start the company? One question and then two, what surprised you most about running a business?
Pat Harrigan (08:54.576)
Yes, I've heard of it. Wonderful. I gotta go one day.
Pat Harrigan (09:08.188)
My wife is the reason that we started the company. So I had a huge firearms habit and my wife came to me one day and said, Pat, you were spending way too much money on your firearms habit. We need to curtail that for the benefit of the family. And it was just her and I and a dog at that point in time. And I said, you know, I really like my firearms hobby. I'd like to continue it. How about you let me start a business and I can take the profits from that business and reinvest it into my hobby. But let me take a certain amount of money out of our savings, which was $3,000 by the way that we'd saved up from our first deployment. She let me put 3,000 bucks into the company and we just grew it. Working with friends and family and just getting a federal firearms license and starting as a dealer and then becoming a manufacturer and then a manufacturer of explosives, importer, destructive device manufacturer. I think I've held every single federal firearms and federal explosives license now in the last 12 years since starting the company except for pawnbroker. I've not been a pawnbroker but every other licensure I've had.
Hondo (10:14.961)
That's amazing. So we have a ton of listeners, a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of folks not maybe familiar with the military. You kind of had that understanding. Going back to your operational days, what would you tell tech companies or somebody who wants to, we've got a lot of well-intentioned Americans who want to support the country, maybe don't know how, any advice for them kind of from an operational standpoint on how to think about working with the military.
Pat Harrigan (10:50.182)
First off, I'd say that a good idea is always a good idea. If you hit some initial resistance, don't give up. If you genuinely believe that your idea is the right solution to the problems that exist, even if the government doesn't recognize it right off the bat, because government is just about the worst example, the best example of the worst customer that you will ever run across in your business career.
The government is full of bureaucracy. It is full of processes and procedures that is so big and bulky it can't get out of its own way to solve its own problems. And so it is very difficult to do business with the government. I am not going to be a politician that's going to come out here and tell you it's candy canes and unicorns. It's the easiest thing that you're ever going to do in your entire life and it's the land of milk and honey. It is absolutely not. And I can tell you from my own personal experience in business, government is a terrible customer that can induce you to invest money that and sometimes they don't make the logical decisions and you got to understand a lot of what government does is political and so if you can understand the paradigm that you're in and understand the timing of politics and you genuinely believe that your idea is a good one it will eventually bear fruit for you but probably not initially
Hondo (12:15.729)
Yeah, it's tough and your work on the HASC this year, I know, is a lot aimed towards, you know, putting that experience to simplifying things, trying to make things easier. You know, we always hear about act reform, but don't see a lot of action. This year, it seems like we see a lot of action on it. Are you satisfied so far with the steps that we're trying to make in the right direction? And where do think we need to do more?
Pat Harrigan (12:44.122)
I think Chairman Rogers, Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, he's provided some really solid leadership. He's a great man too, by the way, but he's provided very solid leadership on the speed with which acquisition can happen. And the kind of top line piece of the NDAA, really his signature accomplishment is going to be the Speed Act. That is really cutting a lot of red tape out of the acquisitions process. For those of you that aren't familiar with the acquisitions process that might not have gone down the with EOD before, you might not exactly see what the difference is, but if you're part of it, if you've been in it, if you've understood it, you understand it very well, it really is a sea change in the way that government is being compelled to do business. And so I think it's a great first step in the right direction. There is a lot more work to do. And part of that work is political. It's understanding, you know, where do we need to go as a department under the current administration? What do you what does the military and the future of the military look like as we do it? Secretary Hegseth has embarked upon doing, which is arraign capabilities to threats. What are the real lasting problems that we should be focused on in the department? How do we get ahead of those with solutions that are both workable but also cost effective, right? I think a big theme that I've really tried to hit on is shaking our defense industrial base out of this malaise that it's in. It has become incredibly good at producing the high cost problems to our enemies, low cost solutions.
And until we flip the paradigm and start actually producing the low cost solutions to our enemies high cost problems, we're not only going to continue to lose the economics of our wars, we're going to continue to lose our wars. And this is something that we have to understand immediately, or it is a five alarm fire for the future of defense in an environment where we're going to continue to see our, you know, I think a CR across the next several years here, I don't see much hope for that not happening. Part of that's for different reasons and different perspectives. But a CR is a cut every single year, right? I mean, that's the way that it works. And so we're going to have to figure out how to do more with less in an environment where technology, very capable technology is proliferating throughout all of our adversaries across the globe where for
One, two, or three percent of the spend that we make, have 80 % of the capability and they have that capability at scale. And that's a real problem for us. We've got to get a handle on that. And we've got to do it in such a way where we start winning the economics of war, we're going to be in trouble.
Lauren Bedula (15:42.32)
You have such an interesting background to think about this problem, having served as a warfighter, now politician, but businessman and founder in between. How do you think about collaboration between those three communities having served there? Like, do you think about that often? Something we see is you have to translate between the warfighter and the businessman. How do you think about bringing those communities together in an effective way to solve this problem or how we're doing on that front?
Pat Harrigan (16:10.404)
It all comes down to people and it comes down to perspective, right? And I think that everybody's got to understand their role in a collaborative process. And if the process isn't collaborative, we don't actually create the solutions to the problems that we have. I think so often, you know, businesses get pigeonholed in a certain way of thinking and saying, you know, I'm from Silicon Valley, this is the way it works here. And that's not the way that it works in Washington or that's not the way it works up in Aberdeen. Same deal, right? Program managers often are, you know, kings of their own fiefdom and can really make some bad decisions for the wrong reasons. And it can be as simple as, want to acquire this piece of technology or want to acquire this kit because I want to go TDY to Bulgaria and I don't Boston, Texas. Bulgaria sounds a lot better, so I'm going to get that over there. Everybody's got to be a good steward of the role and the task that they have in order for the system to work, or it fundamentally breaks down. I've seen all of those things work well. I've seen all of those things work poorly, but we've got to understand coming to the table in a collaborative way, we're all in trying to solve America's problems. And if we let anything get in front of that big picture, we get off track really quickly. And I think the task for us legislatively is putting the left and right limits and the parameters and making sure that we don't have those perverse incentives either in government or in the military or in the private sector to take the train off the tracks, if that makes sense.
Hondo (18:47.769)
So, Congressman, you've seen tech on the battlefield on the special forces side. You you probably had some tech there earlier than others. We've now seen Ukraine, you know, Israel. What is your sense of the speed of technology? You've talked a little bit about we need low-cost solutions. And what tangible steps should we be taking?
I know you've had some thoughts on this of particularly in low-cost drones but you can apply that to a lot of other things. How do we ramp up manufacturing and our kind of mindset to go after things in quantity not just go after the exquisite which we tend to have done as a country.
Pat Harrigan (19:37.99)
Look, I've got, before I talk about that Hondo, I've got three main priorities up here. We got, as I said earlier, got 17 out of the 18 of our key initiatives across the finish line in the NDAA markup. But the top three there are, number one, an initiative that we call Sky Foundry. And that is a plan to make the first million FPV drones in this country. And I wanna unpack that a little bit because it directly addresses your question.
We also led the language to move nuclear power onto our military bases, both through SMR, small modular reactors, as well as micro reactors, because I'm a huge believer in taking nuclear technology, putting it on our military bases, air locking our electrical supply for all of our bases, but also providing particularly our operational units that operate at the tip of the spear, genuine portable power that is infinite. And third, I want to completely decouple our supply chain from China.
And those three are just absolutely critical as changes that have to happen across the span of defense if we're going to set the conditions to both deter or if necessary defeat China, which is the greatest and most technologically sophisticated adversary that we've ever faced in the history of our nation. And we've got to be wide out.
And so coming back to you, Hondo, if you look at the trajectory of conflict as exemplified by a regional conflict in Ukraine, again, not a global conflict, a regional conflict amongst regional players, Russia is going to make 5 million FPV drones this year. Ukraine is going to make 4, almost 10 million drones entering the battlefield. And it's not guns, it's not rockets. FPV drones that are killing people. 80 % of the casualties in that conflict on both sides are being caused by a small tiny little drone controlled by somebody with a virtual reality headset that has a small explosive on it and are achieving the terminal effects that we could only imagine in even 10 years ago. And so the nature of conflict is fundamentally changing. And what everybody thinks about what our conflict experience was in the global war on terror, I cannot tell you it is 100 % different today than it was for our entire veteran community. It is a completely different ballgame. We all played basketball and the game being played today on the modern battlefield is baseball.
And my thought theory on this is government is a really bad customer. The United States is not currently at war. But we absolutely need these capabilities. And we need the capabilities to defend ourselves against the threats that these very inexpensive yet very capable technologies are providing both providing us opportunity and providing against us in terms of threats. And because we're not at war, we don't need a million of these drones right now. We can't just send a demand signal to industry that says, put a million drones in a warehouse. We're going to upgrade the software wirelessly every week. That is not a good use of taxpayer money on behalf of the American people because as we're learning from Ukraine, the iteration of technology and innovation is in a short period like four to six weeks, the hardware is changing. And the hardware changes depending on the terminal effects that you're actually looking at achieving. The technology associated with it is changing just as rapidly as the software is changing, particularly the software required to operate.
Hondo (23:12.389)
Mm-hmm.
Pat Harrigan (23:27.388)
And so what we need is we need to invest in the capability to make a million drones because it is a lot easier for us to go from a million drones to 20 million drones than it is for us to go from zero drones to a million drones. And let me be really clear, we are at zero drones right now. And we're at like 50,000, but it's effectively zero. And that 50,000 is wholly dependent on a Chinese supply chain. That does not work. And so my...
Hondo (23:48.472)
Okay.
Pat Harrigan (23:56.802)
Overall apparatus and thought theory is we're going to accomplish this through a program called Sky Foundry and I'll be happy to unpack that if you want Hondo if you want to go to a different direction we absolutely
Hondo (24:08.369)
Yeah, go ahead. I think your ideas, you know, it's a little of a SOCOM, right? You can't wait for a crisis to be ready for a crisis, right? yeah, so give us a little more on that.
Pat Harrigan (24:19.9)
So, Sky Foundry will be a government owned, government operated, contractor assisted methodology of producing FPV drones at a rate of one million a year.
And the idea behind this is there's 150, 250 different drone companies out there that are all vying. And if we pin kind of a national king, that creates a lot of problems. The first problem being we probably only need several thousand drones across the entire force right now to get everybody adequately trained up. Simultaneously, we have a real demand requirement from the American
people to drop the costings of those drones. Right now we're paying $20,000, $30,000 a piece for these drones. It is really hard to have Private Joe Snuffy fly a $25,000 drone into a tree and destroy it. Have to flipple, have to do everything that is required of a loss of that type of...
on behalf of the American people. Like we have to have a trittable systems. And the only way that we have a trittable systems that we treat like ammunition, you shoot it, it's gone. You're not accounting for it anymore. It's out there. We're gonna make some mistakes in training. We're gonna blow some of these things up because they're gonna be one way attack drones on ranges. And we're gonna do it every day and we're gonna do it all throughout basic training because that's what our soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines need to understand the modern environment.
and they need to be proficient at it coming out of basic training, right? We have to create the foundation for all of that to happen. And we don't do that if we have $20,000 drones. And so what I wanna do is I wanna drive the cost down to 500 bucks. I wanna take a lot of the lessons that are coming out of Ukraine. Simultaneously, I wanna decouple that supply chain out of China. I wanna make that stuff here in the United States. The government's gonna invest in that capability, a lot of money. And then what it's gonna do is it is going to put a lot of private contractors and give them a seat at the table around Sky Foundry and the way that private contractors are going to make money is number one through a consulting arrangement, but number two and this is where it gets really interesting which is this is going to be I think the best hybridization of you know what government and private partnership can do it's something new it's not been done before. But there's 13 main components to every drum. Doesn't matter what the terminal effects are, doesn't matter what the size or shape, there's 13 main components and each of those components have sub-components. Much like a law firm that has multiple lawyers working on a case, they've got to figure out how do I pay all these lawyers from everything that we've earned, right? There's an equation and that equation is who sourced the business, who did the research, who actually tried it at trial, so on and so forth, right?
We're going to rack and stack every single one of those major components and sub components and provide it an overall percentage of contribution to the overall drone. And then the intellectual property that is contributed by those contractors is going to be multiplied by the production to generate a royalty. And those royalties are going to be bottom line dollars to every single one of those contractors.
And so simultaneously while the government with giving an indeterminable demand moving forward is not going to induce private capital to invest money that it can't generate a return on even though we know this is something that we are definitely going to need in the future. We just don't need. We just don't know when that future is. it two days from now? Is it six months from now? Is it six years from now? We don't know. We're not going to induce that investment but we are going to allow private contractors that have and gain the trust of our operators a seat at the table and the chance at making a lot of money for not having to have made the capital investment. And what it does is it creates an environment where all of these contractors are held in tension because they're each trying to knock each other off to provide the latest and greatest intellectual property that gets integrated into our systems, keeping the FPV drones on the cutting edge of technology. But it also holds them in cooperation because they all get paid based off the production volume that happens provided that they've earned a seat at the table. And so I think it's a great opportunity to get a lot of these smaller, younger companies that just have a ton of amazing ideas and they've got the trust of the folks that they're working with alongside the DoD, but they don't necessarily have the capital of a big prime or the horsepower that comes with it.
But they've got a lot of new and neat and nimble ideas that need to be brought into the fold. And so I think we can have everybody from Prime all the way down to the smallest, smartest, next smartest guy in defense that's going to revolutionize defense but is working out of his garage right now, we can provide them an opportunity to earn a seat at the table and earn some real dollars.
Lauren Bedula (29:22.23)
Wow. It's so exciting to hear this. And you mentioned briefly private capital. I have one more question. And it was interesting. I mentioned Detroit. There were just as many investors there as there were tech companies. The private capital community is really lining up around this issue of strengthening the industrial base. Any ideas for how they can play a stronger role, whether it be private equity or venture capitalists?
Pat Harrigan (29:46.844)
Yeah, I think it's be very smart, right? And I think that they've already understood the role that they can play. They have started to shift the paradigm in defense. And I would say that that has had a really good impact on kind of shaking things up, getting it away from some of the... that exists within the primes, which the primes are actively trying to correct right now too, right? So I don't want to, know, poo poo on anybody here. It needs to be a big tent in defense. And that's how we end up getting the best solutions. That's how we end up increasing competition and driving down costs. But ultimately, I would also suggest that everybody stay very cautious too, because I think you've got different forces at play in Washington that, you know, potentially keep things at a CR level of spend, we may end up having another reconciliation package and that may or may not have anything to do with plussing up defense again and giving it kind of that other injection, another injection into the arm. But I certainly wouldn't count on that. And so the perspective moving forward needs to be, how do we lower costs and increase capability? And if you have a solution that fits that paradigm, and I'm not saying that, you know, hey, we were paying X, you know, for a certain system and now we have a comparable system that's a quarter of X. Well, if we should have been paying a tenth of X the entire time, then a quarter of an X doesn't really, you know, it doesn't really accomplish the objective, right? So just saying it's cheaper isn't necessarily a step in the right direction that the government's gonna step out and take. But when there's a demonstrable example, of something that is done much better, much more efficiently for effectively the same terminal effects or even greater terminal effects, the government's going to be pretty hard pressed to say no in the future environment that we have that's both financially and fiscally constrained as well as practically faced with very severe threats.
Hondo (31:50.737)
So, Congressman, as we're wrapping up here, just maybe one, a little bit more personal question. Now, you've made it through military, you made it through special forces training, deployments, you made it through, you know, running up to an election and campaigning. You know, all that takes, you know, now you're here, you're fired up, you're energetic. Any secrets to staying resilient and, you know, keeping the energy level up in these long campaigns that are
You know, take a lot of energy, take a lot of influence, anything you'd like to pass on, on how do you, what secrets you have to stay and fired up every day and trying to make an impact wherever you go.
Pat Harrigan (32:34.202)
I came to Congress because I genuinely believed that we were going to be the first generation of Americans to hand off less opportunity to the next generation. My kids, I got two little girls, I got the Special Forces Curse Hondo, which is no curse at all. I would not trade my little girls for anything, but their names are Reagan and McKinley, they're five and seven, and they are really everything to my wife and I, and I just want to see them inherit a world that's absolutely...
And we are facing the potentiality of a world that's really on fire. there, as Douglas MacArthur said a long, long time ago, there is no substitute for victory. And so if you believe in something, if you believe that the solution that you have is the right solution, it's very simple. Just never give up, never give in. And you're gonna get it across the finish line. It doesn't matter whether it's in business. It doesn't matter whether you're a PEO for the next program that may or may not make it. Like if you really believe it and you really work that you're going to get that sucker across the finish line. And same thing up here in Congress, despite all the headwinds that are created to impede you from getting things done, we just put our heads down, got a great staff and a great team. And whether it's working with the professional staff members on the committee, whether it's working with the committee chair, or whether it's working with the chair over on the Senate side, Chairman Wicker. it's working with leadership in the House or over in the Department of Defense, Secretary of the Army, Secretary of Defense, even the President. There is nothing that you can't do if you just don't put your head down and never give up. And that's why we got so many of our initiatives across the finish line, because they really are the right solutions to the problems that we have. And when I'm out of those solutions, Hondo, it'll be time for me to leave.
Lauren Bedula (34:25.037)
Well, Congressman Harrigan, we know how busy you are. Thank you so much for taking the time to come on and share with us all these initiatives and for all the energy you're putting into these issues.
Pat Harrigan (34:37.584)
Hey Lauren, it was great to spend some time with y'all. Hondo, great to actually see you in person and look forward to meeting you both in person one of these days soon and holler if my office can ever be helpful. Absolutely. Y'all take care.
Hondo (34:48.625)
Thank you very much.