This vision of unified command & control is nothing new for the Army: it’s been tried before again and again and again — with mixed results. The last attempt, Future Combat Systems in the early 2000s, lit $18 billion on fire (and even more if we include the cancelled TSAT program that was to be the space comm layer) with little to show for it other than a boost to Boeing and SAIC’s share price.

In this piece, I’ll go over the history of the Army’s C2 efforts along with how it grappled with the introduction of new tech like GPS. I’ll focus primarily on the ground-centric systems here, since air defense systems like FAAD, CRAMC2 and IFPC are an entirely different solution set. Finally I’ll talk about what’s different and what we might learn from it.

What’s different this time?

Since FCS was cancelled, commercial technology has evolved quite a bit. So has the acquisition model - with new players not dependent on cost plus business models entering the field like Palantir and Anduril. Networking and wireless data management technology and software that was exquisite 20 years ago has become commercialized and ubiquitous. Computing power is 1000x cheaper today then then.

The proliferation of autonomous systems on the battlefield is becoming a forcing function for the Army to finally resolve a problem it has been struggling with since the TACFIRE era of the 1970s: fragmented command-and-control architectures that cannot coherently integrate sensors, shooters, autonomy, and decision-making at scale.

A force operating hundreds or thousands of unmanned aerial systems, loitering munitions, autonomous ground vehicles, and AI-enabled sensors cannot function through stove-piped architectures and manually synchronized workflows.

Earlier generations of battle command systems assumed relatively finite inputs—human observers, discrete ISR feeds, bounded networks. Autonomous systems fundamentally alter that equation because they are not merely platforms; they are persistent producers and consumers of data. A force operating hundreds or thousands of unmanned aerial systems, loitering munitions, autonomous ground vehicles, and AI-enabled sensors cannot function through stove-piped architectures and manually synchronized workflows. The scale alone breaks the model. Pentagon planners increasingly discuss autonomous systems not in the hundreds, but in the tens or even hundreds of thousands—a scale shift reflected in the Replicator initiative’s push to field large numbers of low-cost autonomous platforms within an 18-to-24 month window. What emerges is a totally different environment with AI enabled machines continuously generating targets, telemetry, classifications, positional updates, electronic signatures, and probabilistic assessments faster than humans can manually reconcile them.

In that environment, integrated C2 stops being an aspirational modernization goal and becomes a prerequisite for operational survival. Systems like ATAK, Anduril’s Lattice, Maven, and emerging NGC2 architectures are all attempts to address this reality by transforming command-and-control from a collection of discrete systems into a continuously adaptive data environment. The battlefield itself begins to resemble a distributed software ecosystem in which autonomous systems are both participants in the network and drivers of its evolution. In a sense, autonomy is forcing the Army to confront something it has deferred for decades: command-and-control can no longer be organized around platforms and programs. It must be organized around data, orchestration, and machine-speed coordination in environments where disruption, degradation, and information overload are assumed from the outset.

Integrated Army C2 has always been just out of reach

What’s striking, looking back across sixty years of Army command-and-control systems, is not how much has changed—but how persistent the core ambition has been. From TACFIRE to NGC2, the throughline is almost embarrassingly simple: compress time, reduce uncertainty, and move information faster than the enemy can react. Everything else—hardware, doctrine, buzzwords—is scaffolding around that singular obsession.

Origins

TACFIRE, born in the 1960s, feels primitive now, but it represented a quiet revolution. Before it, artillery was an exercise in disciplined friction: forward observers calling in targets, fire direction centers calculating trajectories by hand, guns firing on delayed instructions. TACFIRE didn’t eliminate the humans; it reorganized them around a machine that could think faster. It was less about automation than about tempo. If you could shave minutes down to seconds, you could reshape the battlefield. That was the wager.

But TACFIRE’s scope was narrow. It solved the artillery fire control problem (partially) without pretending to solve the war. And in that constraint, there was a kind of clarity. The system knew what it was for.

The decades that followed are, in some sense, a story of losing that clarity.

Introduction of Fully Digital Tools - and stovepipes

By the 1980s and into the Gulf War era, the Army began assembling a constellation of systems: AFATDS (Advanced Field Artillery Tactical Data System) for fires, MCS (Maneuver Control System) for maneuver, ASAS (All Source Analysis System) for intelligence and Blue Force Tracker (BFT). Each system did something TACFIRE-like within its own domain, but the ambition had expanded. No longer was the goal simply to accelerate a function; it was to integrate functions. Commanders didn’t just want faster artillery—they wanted a coherent picture of the battlefield.

GPS and the PNT revolution

Enter GPS stage left. Starting in the late 1970s early GPS—still imperfect, still intermittently available—started to replace the messy, human process of map reading, terrain association, and grid estimation. It didn’t fully solve the problem, but it changed its character. Uncertainty was no longer something you managed; it was something you expected the system to eliminate.

The First Gulf War exposed both the potential and the limits. GPS came into its own here—not yet ubiquitous, but decisive enough to shift how forces moved and fired. Units navigated with a confidence that would have been unthinkable a decade prior. Fires became more precise not just because the math improved, but because the inputs did. The battlefield began to flatten into coordinates.

But even then, there were hints of fragility. GPS worked because it was uncontested. It was a gift of the environment, not a guarantee of it.

The Army Battle Command Systems (ABCS) of the 1990s and 2000s represented a more explicit attempt to build a “system of systems.” Blue Force Tracker, CPOF, DCGS-A— another brick defining the battlefield. For the first time, commanders could see friendly forces in near real time, collaborate across distances, and plan with digital tools instead of acetate overlays.

If TACFIRE was about speed, ABCS was about visibility, and visibility was increasingly anchored in GPS. Blue Force Tracker did not just display units—it located them with a precision that made the map itself feel alive. AFATDS, now matured from its TACFIRE lineage, could assume that firing units, targets, and observers were all operating on a shared spatial truth. The battlefield wasn’t just visible; it was synchronized.

This was the quiet revolution of PNT: not just knowing where you are, but ensuring that everyone else knows it too, in the same frame of reference, at the same moment in time. But this synchronization came with a hidden cost. Systems began to assume GPS as a constant—like gravity. Workflows were built around it. Decision-making accelerated because position was treated as solved.

By the early 2000s, the Army had, in effect, built a command-and-control architecture that depended on GPS without fully acknowledging the dependency. SAASM, a Selective Availability feature added to the GPS constellation that encrypted its signals, increasing robustness to jamming while denying GPS to the enemy, had been allowed to grow stale. Meanwhile the much more robust M-code encryption set - powered by programs like OCX (cancelled this year), GPS Block III and MGUE - had over a decade of deployment delays due to procurement malpractice - resulting in about a 6-10 year gap between when customers were directed to transition from SAASM to M-Code based receivers being fully functional. Further compounding the problem was that our allies became increasingly dependent on GPS but were at the back of the line to receive these new receivers and crypto keys required for them to function.

GPS-Denied

Russia’s use of GPS jamming and spoofing—first in localized experiments, then more visibly in Syria, and ultimately at scale in Ukraine—forced a confrontation with something the architecture had quietly avoided: what happens when position is no longer trustworthy? Overnight the accuracy rate for GPS guided artillery shells and HIMARS in Ukraine went from better than 50% to less than 10% overnight. The Ukrainians stopped using the Excalibur shells entirely - something that could have easily been avoided if M-code had been available and lived up to expectations.

Today GPS jamming is so ubiquitous there is literally a website where it is tracked worldwide that is updated on a daily basis. In GPS-denied or degraded environments, the entire edifice of digital command and control begins to wobble. The battlefield, once neatly mapped, reverts to ambiguity.

A generation of systems had been built on the premise of persistent, accurate PNT. When that premise failed, there was no easy fallback. The response has been both evolutionary and reactive.

Efforts like M-code represent an attempt to harden GPS itself. Other efforts like CRPA antennas aim to make the GPS receivers themselves more robust. But hardening GPS is only part of the solution. Contrast that with contemporary approaches which are attempting to uncouple from GPS. Systems like DAPS attempt to provide alternative sources of positioning—integrating inertial navigation, signals of opportunity, and other techniques to maintain awareness even when GPS is degraded or denied. UAS are increasingly regressing to older techniques such as Terrain Following Navigation and some companies like Q-CTRL are even looking at gravity techniques to unshackle us from GPS. The goal is not perfect precision, but robustness and survivability.

In other words, the system is learning that uncertainty cannot be eliminated, only managed.

An exercise in procurement malpractice

Future Combat Systems (FCS), launched in the early 2000s, was the Army’s most ambitious attempt to reimagine command and control as a fully networked system-of-systems. Sensors, shooters, vehicles, radios, and unmanned platforms would all exist within a unified architecture, sharing data continuously across the force. Information superiority would become the decisive advantage. In retrospect, FCS reads less like a failed program than an early preview of ideas that would later reappear under different names: distributed sensors, network-centric warfare, integrated battle command, and persistent connectivity. But FCS attempted to realize all of these concepts simultaneously, binding software, hardware, and doctrine into a single tightly coupled system whose complexity ultimately exceeded the Army’s ability to field it. What it underestimated was not technology, but integration itself. The network that was supposed to simplify warfare became too complex to stabilize long enough to survive.

By the time the program was canceled in 2009 (fun fact: the program manager for FCS was none other than former Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenberg), it had become clear that the problem was not simply execution. It was architectural. FCS treated command and control as something that could be designed in advance, specified in detail, and delivered as a finished product. But the battlefield—and the technologies shaping it—were evolving too quickly for that model to hold.

In that sense, FCS failed in a way that was ultimately instructive. It revealed the limits of monolithic design, and the risks of trying to impose coherence through centralization. The lessons would linger, even as the program itself disappeared.

And they would resurface, years later, in a very different approach.

ISR Management - a Parallel line of effort that folds in

ASAS emerged during the final years of the Cold War as the Army confronted a new kind of problem: not a shortage of information, but an excess of it. Signals intelligence, imagery, battlefield reporting, and human sources all arrived through separate systems and were interpreted locally, making coherence difficult even when the data existed. ASAS attempted to reduce that friction by pulling disparate streams into a common analytical environment, though the architecture remained workstation-centric, analyst-driven, and fundamentally linear. Intelligence still moved in stages—collection, analysis, dissemination—but ASAS marked the beginning of the Army treating intelligence less as a series of reports and more as a continuously accumulating data environment.

After 9/11, DCGS-A inherited this architecture but attempted to scale it into permanence. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan transformed ISR from episodic collection into continuous observation: full-motion video, drone surveillance, biometrics, geospatial data, signals intelligence. DCGS-A sought to unify this expanding sensor ecosystem into a persistent operational framework, but in doing so became emblematic of a deeper tension between traditional defense integration models and the emerging software-centric conception of battlefield intelligence. The question was no longer whether data could be collected. It was whether humans could remain cognitively synchronized with the scale of its accumulation. Around this same time, Palantir also emerged as a popular choice for analysts on the ground in theater - but not the procurement folks responsible for buying it. This famously led to Palantir suing the government in 2014 - and winning for a change to open up DCGS to commercial solutions rather than just awarding it to Raytheon. They later went on to win a major part of this contract.

Maven represented a different answer to the same problem. Where ASAS organized intelligence and DCGS federated it, Maven sought to compress perception itself. Machine learning systems were trained not merely to store ISR, but to identify patterns within it—to reduce the burden of attention. The center of gravity shifted from databases to inference. Yet Maven’s early trajectory revealed how unstable this transition would be. Google’s withdrawal from the program in 2018 briefly interrupted what many inside the Pentagon had assumed was an inevitable convergence between Silicon Valley and defense (interestingly enough this same event was a key catalyst for the creation of DIU and the founding of Anduril). In the aftermath, the Joint AI Center (JAIC )emerged to institutionalize military AI development across the department, later evolving into the CDAO as AI became less a niche analytical capability than an organizing layer for modern command-and-control itself. Systems like Anduril’s Lattice, ATAK, and emerging NGC2 architectures extend this logic further still: sensors, autonomous systems, operators, and algorithms increasingly exist within the same operational loop. The battlefield no longer merely collects information. It persistently observes, prioritizes, and recommends—continuously shaping human attention in real time.

Bottoms up C2

Between the sprawling institutional architectures of DCGS-A and the emerging AI-enabled ecosystems of NGC2, systems like ATAK introduced a different model entirely. The Android Tactical Assault Kit emerged not from the logic of centralized enterprise integration, but from operational immediacy. Lightweight, mobile, and rapidly extensible, ATAK pushed situational awareness and sensor integration downward—from command posts to individual operators and small units. What made ATAK significant was not simply its interface, but its architecture. Unlike earlier battle command systems built around fixed workflows and tightly controlled integration pipelines, ATAK functioned more like a tactical software platform: modular, API-driven, and adaptable to rapidly changing operational needs. Over time it became a convergence layer for mapping, ISR feeds, targeting data, Blue Force Tracking, unmanned systems, and edge-device communications across both conventional and special operations forces. In many ways, ATAK represented the military’s first widely successful realization that battlefield software could evolve more like a commercial ecosystem than a traditional defense program. The system foreshadowed much of what would later define the NGC2 era: distributed interfaces, edge computing, real-time collaboration, and a battlefield architecture in which the user is no longer merely consuming information, but continuously participating in the network itself.

Systems like Anduril’s Lattice extend the logic of ATAK further still. Lattice is not simply an ISR display layer; it is an orchestration environment in which sensors, autonomous systems, operators, and AI models exist within the same operational loop. The boundary between collection, analysis, and action becomes increasingly porous.

Emerging NGC2 architectures reflect this same direction of travel. In addition to Anduril’s Lattice, Lockheed Martin’s work within the Army’s NGC2 prototyping efforts points toward a future in which command-and-control itself becomes modular, cloud-native, and continuously adaptive across contested environments. At the same time, newer entrants such as Picogrid working in the same ecosystem suggest a parallel shift toward lightweight, software-defined integration layers capable of rapidly connecting heterogeneous sensors, autonomous systems, and edge devices without the burden of traditional defense architectures. We are seeing the emergence of an ecosystem that is able to take several architecturally different approaches and try them out to see what works best. Like ATAK this is top down rather than bottoms up. A welcome change from the era of top down, requirements heavy C2 systems like FCS.

The trajectory from ASAS to NGC2 is therefore not merely a story about better software or larger datasets. It is the gradual construction of a battlefield architecture in which cognition itself becomes distributed across networks, algorithms, and machines and which is much more tolerant of federated and ad hoc systems.

Melt and repour

NGC2—Next-Generation Command and Control—is less a system than a repudiation of the old approach. It begins with a different premise: that command and control is not about platforms, but about data. Data should not live inside systems; systems should exist to manipulate shared data. It’s a subtle shift, but a profound one. Embedded within that shift is another realization: the bottleneck is no longer the movement of information, but the interpretation of it.

As GPS degrades and positional certainty erodes, knowing where something is becomes less reliable. In that ambiguity, knowing what something is—through pattern recognition, behavior, and probabilistic classification—gains importance. Maven-like systems begin to compensate for uncertainty in position with confidence in identification.

But this introduces a new tension. Earlier systems were trusted because they were legible. AI based intelligence systems like Maven operates probabilistically, often opaquely. It doesn’t just accelerate decisions—it shapes them, by determining what enters the decision space at all.

In that sense, Maven is less a component of NGC2 than a precursor to it. NGC2 assumes a world of overwhelming data and contested networks. Maven addresses the human constraint within that world: attention. It represents a shift from systems that move information to systems that shape perception. That may prove to be the more consequential transformation.

In the NGC2 vision, software becomes something closer to an ecosystem—modular, continuously updated, loosely coupled. The analogy is not military at all; it is commercial. Think less “weapons system” and more “operating system.”

In the TACFIRE era, software was inseparable from hardware. In the ABCS era, software was distributed across multiple systems. In the NGC2 vision, software becomes something closer to an ecosystem—modular, continuously updated, loosely coupled. The analogy is not military at all; it is commercial. Think less “weapons system” and more “operating system.”

This is where the language starts to change. Cloud. Edge computing. AI-enabled decision support. These are not just technological upgrades; they signal a different way of thinking about command and control. The battlefield becomes a network, and the network becomes the primary terrain.

But the ambition is familiar. Faster decisions. Better synchronization. Shorter kill chains. The difference is that the Army is now trying to achieve these goals not through centralized systems, but through distributed architectures that assume disruption as a baseline condition.

Project Convergence, CJADC2, TITAN—these initiatives are all attempts to operationalize that shift. Sensors feed data into networks, algorithms help prioritize targets, shooters receive instructions with minimal delay. These systems are increasingly designed to function even when parts of the network are degraded or absent.

Yet beneath the technical evolution, the same constraints persist. Bandwidth is limited. Networks are vulnerable. Adversaries adapt. And humans—still the ultimate decision-makers—must interpret and trust the outputs of increasingly complex systems.

Trust, in particular, is an underappreciated variable. What happens when decision support depends on fused data from degraded GPS, inertial systems drifting over time, and algorithms reconciling conflicting inputs? The system may be more resilient, but is it more legible? There is a risk that in solving the problem of vulnerability, we reintroduce the problem of comprehension.

The logic of modern warfare—multi-domain operations, contested environments, rapid decision cycles—demands something like NGC2. The question is not whether the Army will move in this direction, but how well it will manage the transition.

Boiling it all up

Looking back, the history of command and control is less a straight line than a series of oscillations. Between certainty and uncertainty. Between dependence and resilience. Between systems that assume the world is stable, and systems that are built for when it is not.

TACFIRE sat closer to one end of that spectrum: focused, constrained, comprehensible. NGC2 sits at the other: expansive, adaptive, and explicitly designed for a world where even something as fundamental as position cannot be taken for granted.

What remains constant is the underlying ambition—to see the battlefield more clearly, to act more quickly, to impose order on chaos. It is a deeply human ambition, even as it becomes increasingly mediated by machines.

Perhaps that is the real throughline. Not the systems themselves, but the belief that with the right tools, uncertainty can be tamed. That war can be made legible, if only we can process enough information, fast enough. That is the belief that has driven six decades of innovation..and one that, despite everything, remains just out of reach.

The imperative that the massive proliferation of autonomous systems on the battlefield has made enhanced C2 not just a nice to have but an absolute imperative. Robots are kind of dumb and unlike humans lack initiative. Even if we could give them initiative, we may not trust them to use it, because culturally we fear a human not being the one to push the final button. As we evolve from one v one like we see on the battlefield in Ukraine today to one v many, the necessity of robust C2 to manage our emerging army of autonomous systems may be what finally forces us to get our act together on unified C2. This more than anything I think is what will make NGC2 succeed: the fact that it cannot fail.

I haven’t exactly been in a cave, just not writing much here. The fact that the dynamics of this war keep changing on an almost hourly basis has also triggered a number of “melt and repour” moments that has changed this post as well. In case you missed it, In February I wrote something for Palantir’s First Breakfast Newsletter on “The Art of Straphanging” about small business contracting schemes. I also made an appearance on the Drone Wars Podcast talking about our Vadris product and a full-page interview with the Journal of Electromagnetic Dominance: “A New Paradigm for Technology Acquisition and Fielding” (this is behind a paywall so may not be visible to non-JED subscribers).

Epic Fury at Day 40 - Causus Belli coming into focus

Now that we are 40 days+ out from the first bombs hitting Iran from the US and Israel, the reason why we are in this situation in the first place along with the strategies of the two sides is coming much more into focus.

In the longer arc of history, what we are witnessing looks less like a discrete crisis and more like the latest campaign in a war Iran has been waging against the United States, Israel, and the broader Western order for nearly half a century. The throughline is not subtle: from the seizure of 66 American hostages in 1979, to the bombing of the barracks in Beirut in 1983 that killed 241 Marines, to the tanker wars of the 1980s, to the provision of IEDs and roadside bombs that killed thousands of Americans in Iraq, to decades of sustained support for Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and a constellation of other militias operating across the region - Iran has been at war with us whether we like it or not. Taken together, this is not a series of isolated episodes but a continuous pattern of conflict—one that was often prosecuted below the threshold of declared war, but a war nonetheless. The uncomfortable reality is that Iran has long understood itself to be in confrontation with the West - the cries of “death to America, death to Israel” from it’s leaders should be taken at face value, even as we oscillated between confrontation, containment, and uneasy coexistence. What changed after October 7 was not the existence of that war, but its character: a shift from limited, compartmentalized proxy conflict to something closer to a generalized, multi-front campaign, still mediated through proxies but far less constrained in scope, tempo, and ambition.

The stated logic behind U.S. and Israeli strategy is straightforward on the surface: to shape the battlespace before it hardens into something unmanageable. First, to prevent Iran from crossing the nuclear threshold outright. Second, and arguably just as important, to disrupt the parallel track (its growing arsenal of drones and ballistic missiles) that could enable a form of non-nuclear deterrence capable of holding the region at risk in the opening hours of a conflict. We sought to prevent the emergence of a Middle Eastern analogue to the “Seoul hostage problem”. And third, to target the regime itself at its center of gravity, wagering that the internal pressures visible in recent uprisings that were brutally suppressed might yet resurface if the system is sufficiently destabilized.

So why are the Iranians and their proxies declaring victory when 90% of their Navy is at the bottom of the ocean; almost their entire air force and most of their missiles, drones and launchers - and the industrial base that created them - have been destroyed and most of it’s leadership has been sent to meet their maker? One must understand that the Iranian regime’s aim is to just survive. They do so by refusing direct confrontation with massive forces but instead attacking soft targets in the region to inflict maximum economic pain, closing the strait of Hormuz and finally by waging a massive propaganda campaign through their online proxies and western media. They realize that American and even moreso our allies in Europe have a low appetite for foreign adventure and that economic annoyance is likely to be a key motivator for withdrawal in a war not viewed as existential by many in the west. It’s a 21st century riff on the classic Fabian strategy, being played out through a media and online flamebot war looking to win public opinion. It’s an insurgency playing out in maritime insurance markets - where they can literally stop traffic through the strait by denying you coverage to travel through it. That has been Iran’s strategy all along and must be the one that the US and Israel must acknowledge as an independent front they must also be prepared to fight on.

The Fabian Strategy of Iran

In case it wasn’t obvious to anyone who has been studying the current conflict in the middle east for more than a millisecond - Iran has spent much of the last 25 years planning to confront the overwhelming force of the US (and more recently Israel) with a Fabian strategy.

From the Iranian regime’s standpoint, survival by itself is a victory

Iran’s conduct in the current conflict reads less like a bid for decisive victory and more like a patient, almost classical exercise in strategic refusal: the logic of Fabius refracted through modern networks, proxies, and chokepoints. Rather than meeting superior conventional force head-on, Tehran disperses the battlefield, substituting presence for confrontation and time for territory: Hezbollah probes in the north, Houthis harass global shipping lanes, militias in Iraq and Syria needle U.S. positions, all while Iran itself remains just out of reach, never quite committing the mass that would invite annihilation. The result is not chaos but structure—a deliberately stretched battlespace in which costs accumulate asymmetrically. This is war as endurance rather than climax: a system designed to absorb strikes and continue functioning through its distributed parts. Iran is not trying to win in the conventional sense at all; it is trying to make winning impossible for its adversaries, to convert superiority into burden, and to turn time itself into a weapon—betting, as Fabius once did (against Hannibal) that the stronger power will exhaust its will before it can impose its strength.

Avoiding the Seoul Hostage Problem

The “Seoul hostage problem” is simple: a weaker actor positions enough firepower within range of a dense civilian center that any conflict begins with unavoidable devastation, not maneuver. North Korea does not need to defeat South Korea militarily to deter action; it only needs to guarantee that in the first few minutes of fighting Seoul would absorb so much catastrophic damage from artillery and rockets that it becomes a Pyrrhic victory. This compresses decision-making into a grim calculus where even a successful campaign carries an intolerable upfront cost. Total victory may favor the South Korean side, but the North Koreans making their misery their mission is enough to give the RoK serious pause on escalating.

When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose - Bob Dylan

Iran, viewed through that same lens, was drifting toward a far more dangerous equilibrium—one in which it did not need to win a war or even build a large, deliverable nuclear arsenal to fundamentally constrain its adversaries, but only to assemble a credible, survivable capacity to impose immediate, unacceptable damage on population centers and economic systems at the outset of any conflict. The logic here is subtler than the headline fixation on “the bomb”: it is about compressing time and distance until Tel Aviv, Gulf infrastructure, or even global energy flows become the functional equivalent of Seoul—targets that cannot be defended in the opening hours, only avenged afterward.

U.S. and Israeli strikes have indeed focused on nuclear facilities, missile production, and command infrastructure, but the deeper pattern is that these are precisely the components required to construct such a hostage regime: not just fissile material, but the delivery systems and dispersed networks that make retaliation inevitable and preemption futile. What is being targeted is less a single weapon than a system of coercion. In this reading, the war begins to look less like a last-minute sprint to stop nuclear breakout and more like an earlier, more structural intervention to prevent Iran from achieving a position in which it could hold entire regions at risk in the opening minutes of a war. The fear is not simply that Iran might one day possess a nuclear weapon, but that it might construct a deterrent architecture—distributed, redundant, and fast-acting—that turns that weapon, or even the credible shadow of it, into a permanent veto over action, a condition in which the cost of confrontation is front-loaded, civilianized, and politically unendurable. And if that is the case, then the decision to strike begins to read less like a reaction to imminent capability and more like an attempt to avoid crossing a threshold after which no clean options remain—an effort to prevent the Middle East from acquiring its own version of Seoul, where the war is effectively lost not when it is fought, but when it becomes impossible to fight at all.

Understanding the Mosaic Defense strategy

The Iranian strategy is fragmented by design and intended to thwart efforts to topple it through decapitation. It’s organized into dozens of regional commands with no centralized authority. This is known as the Mosaic Defense Doctrine, which my friend Hamlet Yousef brilliantly describes in his latest substack.

For one thing, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, exists as effectively a paramilitary arm of the Ayatollah but that in reality that really answers only to itself. In this respect it reminds me very much of the Knight’s Templar at the height of their power during the early 13th century - when they were a military organization in theory answering to the pope but in practice largely politically independent (the KGB and the Soviet Union is perhaps another more modern example of this). The IRGC is a convoluted web of financial, corruption, ideological and political assets. As one Iranian friend put it “The IRGC is a hedge fund with an Army…and an international propaganda arm.”

The IRGC literally prints money by using oil to power its over 700,000 crypto mining rigs. Current estimates put their share of crypto mining at upwards of 15%, primarily driven by trying to evade sanctions. This has given Tehran some of the worst air pollution of anywhere on the planet. With UAE, Qatar and others now threatening to cut off Iran completely, it’s likely the regime will try to double down on this, which may be the real reason why Trump threatening their power plants is such a powerful threat to them.

Where does this money go? A large number or Iranian proxies living abroad in the west are living the Trustafarian Instagram lifestyle off the proceeds. This past week, this came into focus as Qassem Solemani’s niece and great niece were apprehended by ICE and deported, along with 400 other children of the regime that were flagged for deportation by the state department. To this I say: it’s about damn time.

Inverse Clausewitz

Both Iran’s approach (especially within its “mosaic defense” and broader strategy) and what’s often called the Gerasimov doctrine emphasize that war is not primarily won on the battlefield, but in the political and psychological domain. A key similarity is their focus on shaping public sentiment to erode an opponent’s will to fight. The Gerasimov framework highlights the use of information operations, propaganda, and exploitation of social divisions to destabilize adversaries and achieve strategic goals without—or before—open combat. Similarly, Iran leverages media, messaging, and regional narratives to raise the perceived cost of conflict, aiming to generate political pressure inside adversary states and discourage escalation.

The Gerasimov doctrine, named after Russian General Valery Gerasimov (who was a key architect of both the insurgency and later the war in Ukraine), is less a formal doctrine than an observed approach to modern conflict that stresses hybrid warfare—the integration of military force with non-military tools like cyber operations, disinformation, economic pressure, and political subversion. It frames conflict as a continuum where non-kinetic means can outweigh traditional military power, enabling a state to achieve strategic objectives by destabilizing adversaries internally before or alongside conventional operations.

Baron Von Clausewitz, arguably the most influential military theorist of the last 200 years, famously quipped that “War is merely the extension of politics - by other means.” The strategy being employed by Iran seems to be the inverse “Politics is the extension of war by other means”.

Iran, like other states, seeks to influence Western discourse indirectly, often by amplifying voices and arguments that align with its strategic interests—particularly opposition to military intervention, sanctions, or escalation. Iran has developed and used online influence networks—often described as “bot armies” or coordinated inauthentic behavior—to shape narratives on social media. These networks amplify pro-Iranian viewpoints, attack critics, and push divisive or anti-intervention messaging, often by using fake accounts, recycled personas, or coordinated posting patterns. The pay for play nature of many social media personalities has also given them another interview to co-opt the narrative through a network of paid useful idiots (I’m looking at you Tucker Carlson & Hasan Piker).

Iran’s goal isn’t just persuasion but volume and perception: creating the impression of widespread support or controversy, which can influence public discourse and, indirectly, political decision-making in target countries. They are trying to flood the zone with bullshit and draw attention away from the facts on the ground.

Bullshit is a greater threat to the truth than lies - Harry Frankfurt

They have also penetrated our free society on the policy and academic fronts. In that context, organizations like the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft have been raising alarms for years with their Iranian sympathies. The Quincy Institute is a Washington-based think tank founded in 2019 that advocates foreign policy restraint, reduced military intervention, and greater reliance on diplomacy .. Critics (often from hawkish or pro-intervention perspectives) argue that such positions objectively benefit Iran or echo its narratives, but these are interpretations and critiques, not definitive evidence of coordination or control.

Iran’s information strategy benefits when legitimate Western voices—think tanks, media figures, academics—advance arguments that reduce public appetite for conflict, regardless of whether those actors are acting independently. This creates an alignment of messaging without necessarily implying direct proxy relationships, which is a common feature of modern information competition and “gray zone” influence.

A war being fought in the sentiment domain

So bringing this all together, we can say that Israel and the US decided to escalate this war to avoid the Seoul Hostage problem for the whole middle east that appeared to be increasingly imminent. However there is an asymmetry in our goals vs the Iranian regime. We seek to neutralize them as a threat in a limited war by eliminating their tools of terror- they seek merely to survive and outlast us. It’s a classic Fabian strategy.

The IRGC believes that it can use what’s left of it’s asymmetric missile and drone capabilities, particularly aimed at closing the Strait of Hormuz, along with it’s heavily damaged proxy network in Yemen, Iraq and Lebanon to inflict just enough economic pain to dissuade us to go away and then they will survive. The IRGC and Mullahs are betting that the US public lacks the interest and political will for even moderate economic pain. That diplomatic pressure from Europe and Asia and the threat of isolation will further break the will to fight.

They are using social media and other media outlets and political avenues to further blunt our will to fight, in the hopes that we will lose our nerve and go away - employing a key element of Gerasimov doctrine.

We cannot let this happen. We must finish what we started.

FCC Covered List Ruling — They Finally Did It

After years of tacit threats to ban DJI from the US, passing half-baked bills, and slowly rolling out incremental sanctions, the FCC has now explicitly acted to block new foreign-made drones and related components from entering the U.S. market under its Covered List authority. What once was talk — “we might put DJI on the Covered List” — has become reality.

The Covered List is pretty draconian sanctions and includes some of the most egregious of corporate foreign bad actors: Huawei, ZTE, Kaspersky labs and China Mobile are all in this club. What’s a little strange here is that ALL foreign drones are included here, not just Chinese and/or Russian.

This isn’t a surprise to anyone who has been watching the drone regulatory ecosystem: from early warnings about data collection and national security to legislative triggers in the 2025 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), this has been building for years.

The way the FCC has executed this policy — and the scope of what it covers — deserves careful unpacking.

One other thing that’s important to recognize: because the ban includes drone components, it also threatens a nascent US small UAS industry. Despite efforts like the Blue UAS initiative stood up by DIU (now managed by DCMA) and Office of Strategic Capital initiatives pouring hundreds of millions into standing up domestic suppliers for critical drone components, trying to free critical national security systems from Chinese supply chains, we are still heavily dependent on foreign supply chains - including Chinese suppliers and contract manufacturers (CMs) - for critical components. In fact, many US component manufacturers still do their BlueUAS approved manufacturing through Chinese CMs with waivers! Hopefully the FCC will begin working with DoW’s BlueUAS organization to get this sorted out in earnest!

What The FCC Actually Did

New Drones Are Effectively Blocked

The FCC’s Covered List now includes foreign-made unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) such that new models from companies like DJI or Autel (or their white label fronts) can no longer receive FCC equipment authorization required for import or sale in the U.S. Without that authorization, such drones can’t legally be sold here.

Retailers Can Still Sell Existing Inventory — For Now

Existing stock that already has FCC authorization remains legal to sell and operate. The immediate supply chain won’t be collapsing overnight. But because new authorizations are blocked:

• retailers can’t restock once inventory runs out.

• manufacturers can’t introduce new product lines.

• and support ecosystems of parts, firmware updates, battery replacements will deteriorate over time.

This gap between existing authorization and ongoing support is where most of the real disruption will occur.

One other unintended consequence of this will be that domestic suppliers will praise prices for commercial use drones because they are no longer having to compete with cheap Chinese imports (the tariff effect). TBD on when this takes place and how much of an impact we can expect. To some extent, this will have a palliative effect because it will enable domestic drone manufacturers some breathing room vs heavily government subsidized Chinese drones. Maybe it would now make sense for PDW, Skydio or others to invest in the manufacturing to satisfy the domestic market?

What It didn’t Do

It didn’t make existing drones illegal. Neither the FAA nor the FCC has grounded fleets already operating in the U.S. and hobbyists, commercial operators, and government users who already own FCC-cleared drones can continue to fly them.

What is uncertain (and the FCC’s evolving authority hints at this) is how far the agency might go toward retroactively revoking certifications on a case-by-case basis. That would require separate proceedings and justifications.

While this covered list ban has been publicly threatened for a while, action this broadly sweeping and quickly rolled out is likely being driven by a similar strategy to what we saw with the global tariffs on “liberation day”: shock and awe and trying to cut off Chinese attempts to outmaneuver us by going through third party countries or playing shell games.

A global ban also has the advantage of not letting DJI or Autel to jurisdiction shop for some libertarian judge who could tie up this ban in court as unfairly targeting them/denying them due process due to an act of spite from the administration. It also has the advantage of catching a large network of shell companies the Chinese have set up to white label their drones to get around DJI acts to be caught in the same drag net.

Component headaches

The Covered List action isn’t just about complete drones. It extends to critical drone components, which means the implications cut deeper into the drone supply chain:

• Telemetry links — the radio data paths that connect airframe to controller.

• GPS/IMU receivers — including multi-constellation navigation hardware and components sourced globally.

• Flight controllers — the onboard computers that stabilize and automate flight.

• Sensors and cameras — heavy data producers; think imaging systems like (Nextvision units from Israel) that are integral to mapping and inspection work.

• Motors and motor controllers — including European motors and suppliers like Hargrave in Australia whose controllers or ESCs are often paired with drones. DefenseScoop

This isn’t theoretical — U.S. manufacturers increasingly source components internationally, not just from China, because there simply aren’t U.S.-scale alternatives in many niches.

One other thing is certain: the Chinese will almost certainly retaliate by closing off their own parts and markets. Perhaps there is an opportunity here for US Drone manufacturers to finally quit China cold turkey? U.S. companies themselves have suffered from reciprocal pressures. In 2024, Skydio, at one point considered America’s preeminent commercial and defense UAV maker, was hit by Chinese sanctions that restricted key components tied to Taiwan and battery suppliers, illustrating how geopolitical tech decoupling cuts both ways.

That’s the rub: blocking foreign parts blunts the competitive advantage of U.S. makers only if the domestic supply base can actually supply those parts. We’re not there yet.

For years, U.S. drone makers have relied on Chinese and other foreign components the way a junkie relies on a methadone clinic: not because they wanted to, but because they had to. There are specific technologies motors, ESCs, advanced navigation modules, specialized RF modems where offshore manufacturing has dominated due to cost or capability.

Now, with the Covered List effectively acting as a choke point for those imports, the industry faces a stark question: Do we have a domestic supply base ready to absorb this demand, or will the policy simply starve both foreign competitors and the domestic industry?

NDAA, Blue UAS, and Supply Chain Reality

The NDAA and the Blue UAS program have been the policy scaffolding for these moves. Blue UAS is meant to certify secure NDAA-compliant drones without foreign adversary nation components, and it’s expanded rapidly in late 2025.

But here’s the twist:

• Blue UAS compliance and Covered List restrictions are not the same thing.

• A drone could be allowed by Blue UAS rules yet still be hamstrung by FCC authorization policy if it includes disallowed components.

• A separate Green UAS list is also being stood up for UAS that are intended for primarily commercial use.

This disjunction creates regulatory friction instead of clarity and is perhaps the biggest headache for those of us working in the industry today.

What About Ukrainian Imports?

There’s burgeoning interest in importing drones and components from Ukraine — both for humanitarian mapping and defense needs. Ukrainian drones are battle proven: many airframes such as Skyfall’s Vampire (aka the Baba Yaga) drone have millions of hours of flight time and are in the Blue UAS process. They are being seen as a potential stopgap while the US small drone manufacturing base catches up.

The Ukrainians themselves have been on this pleasure cruise for a while and they’ve found that it’s hard to kick Chinese supply chains. They’ve also shown that without opening up to other countries, these blanket bans can sweep up products tied to other cheap components like Taiwanese GPS modules, Israeli cameras, or Indian-sourced microelectronics. That risk could, unintentionally, threaten US drone manufacturers upstream long before they ever reach U.S. buyers.

The Ukrainians themselves present a very good case study in just how hard it is to kick Chinese drone components. Let’s take a look at how the last four years have gone for them:

Ukrainian drone industry as a case study in quitting China

As the Ukrainians built up the second largest drone industrial base outside of China, they became increasingly wary of their dependence on Chinese components and supply chains. As one Ukrainian manufacturer confided to me about a year and a half ago “the worry isn’t so much that they’ll (the Chinese) will cut us off entirely - they are making too much money - it is that they will throttle our orders when we least expect them to to help the Russians.”

The Ukrainians have been working earnestly to stand up their own component industrial base - this has been hard to do as domestic drone manufacturing went from low thousands in 2022 to the 6.5 million they expect to produce this year. The Snake Island Institute’s “Building the Arsenal” white paper is a treasure trove of information on how this has played out. As can be seen from the chart above, domestic components have not kept up with demand and they have become increasingly reliant on more and more imported Chinese parts, with domestic production finally turning a corner a few months ago (see the drop in import value curve starting to finally stabilize and taper off in the figure below).

Even then, the types of components the Ukrainians domestically produced are specialized - communications systems, 3D printed chassis and structural components. Critical components such as batteries, motors and motor controllers are still heavily imported, mostly from China. Much of this is driven by the heavy emphasis on per drone cost, which leaves you with few affordable alternatives to the Chinese components. For instance, thermal cameras from China can cost a few hundred dollars vs one from Israel that can cost in the low tens of thousands.

One strategy that HAS worked for the Ukrainians is shifting from Chinese to European sources. Taking advantage of the massive European defense renaissance currently underway, they have been able to shift from Chinese to EU components and thereby at least reduce dependance on Chinese parts from 90% to 38%. Diversification at least has reduced Chinese leverage even if it’s been impossible to full satisfy domestic demand.

“At the beginning of 2024, nearly 90% of the total value of imported drone components came from China. By the first half of 2025, this share had dropped to about 38%, with most of the remainder sourced from European Union suppliers.” (Snake Island Institute report)

Putting it all together in the chart and table below (also from the Snake Island Institute Report) we see how complicated a web the modern supply chain is for any complex industry - not just the drone one. China managed to make itself the workshop for the world while we were all napping, “transitioning to a services economy” and talking about “just in time efficiencies”. The meta theme of the west for the 2020s has been robustness over efficiency; nationalism and vs. globalism. This is just a microcosm of the same thing

Bottom line: after four years of conflict, a wartime economy with nearly 40% of GDP going to production, and a concerted effort to bypass Chinese supply chains and kick their component habit, Ukrainian manufacturers are still getting 38% of their components from them as of September 2025. If the Ukrainians are any example while OSC, DIU and others are aggressively funding US alternatives, it will be a minute before we are able to completely kick our chinese component habit, particularly as demand surges.

Where We Stand Now

The FCC’s action is in effect, and its authority to bar new foreign-made devices is live as of late December 2025. AP News

But the broader saga is still unfolding:

• retroactive certification revocations remain possible but not automatic, which may cause further impacts from this decision.

• Blue UAS lists continue to evolve

• and industry efforts to localize component supply chains are only now getting traction.

Closing thoughts

Yes, the FCC finally acted: blocking new foreign drones (and their parts) from future U.S. authorization. That curbs the subsidization of Chinese drone dominance with American commercial dollars.

But:

• Existing drones aren’t suddenly illegal.

• Component supply chain issues could damage U.S. makers more than they help.

• “Foreign drones” is too broad a vernacular : there are Western and allied manufacturers that pose no national security threat.

I understand the need for shock and awe and a draconian approach to freeze the white labelling shell game DJI was preparing to use to get around sanctions/the covered list. But if this policy is going to serve real security goals, it needs clearer alignment with programs like Blue UAS and a more nuanced approach that distinguishes between China as a threat vector and the globalized supply chains that power modern drone tech.

Watching the Anduril hit pieces land this week—breathless write-ups of drone crashes, culture panic, and “Silicon Valley hubris meets reality” framing—I’m reminded that defense organizations that actually try to bend the curve are always popular targets for the keepers of the old order, and almost never judged on a fair timeline. The Reuters and Wall Street Journal stories are the canonical form: isolate test failures as if they’re indictments rather than data, smuggle in a moral about upstarts needing to be humbled, and let readers feel virtuous for rooting against momentum.

Here’s the thing: I’ve seen this movie enough times that I know the third act before the first reel ends.

When you build hard things for war, you don’t get a clean runway. You get smoke, noise, and a lot of very expensive lessons. The institutions around you—Congress, press, watchdog NGOs, even parts of the Pentagon—are not optimized to understand that. They are optimized to avoid embarrassment and to preserve a procurement theology that confuses paperwork for progress. So any program that moves fast, tests in the open, and treats iteration as a feature of reality gets painted as reckless. Meanwhile, the slow, compliant programs that fail quietly for a decade are treated as serious adults. That inversion is not an accident. It’s the system defending itself.

If you want to know whether this is new, read the archives:

AMRAAM: “too many tests, too many failures, too risky”

In the late Cold War, the AIM-120 AMRAAM program became a punching bag precisely because it was doing what you want a beyond-visual-range missile to do: fire a lot, learn a lot, and keep firing until the envelope is real. GAO reviews in the late 1980s and early 1990s criticized the program for incomplete or insufficiently realistic live-fire testing before production decisions, highlighting reliability and performance deficiencies and warning that the Air Force was taking on risk. Those reports fueled calls for delay or cancellation—classic “you haven’t proven enough, therefore stop” logic.

This RAND note post mortem on the Development of AMRAAM should be required reading for anyone in new defense who wants to understand what it takes to get a really hard program across the line.

“Few acquisition programs have attracted as much attention and controversy as AMRAAM. The program’s problems included substantial cost growth; major schedule slips; several major redesign efforts, one during validation, another after production was originally scheduled to behind…regular congressional attempts to curtail or cancel the program; and stringent externally imposed testing requirements. For most of the 1980s, the program seemed to be “out of control” - Kenneth R. Mayer, The Development of the AMRAAM: A Case Study of Risk and Reward in Weapon Systems Acquisition, 1993

But the entire point of live-fire is that you uncover what your models didn’t know. AMRAAM’s long test slog wasn’t a sign of failure. It was the program paying the price of admission to physics. Today, AMRAAM is the backbone of Western air-to-air kills, with a combat record spanning multiple wars and continual upgrades still extending range and performance. The “black sheep” became table stakes because it was allowed to be ugly in development.

PAC-3: “not effective,” “too many intercept failures”

Fast-forward to missile defense. PAC-3—especially its ERINT lineage—was born into a political environment still traumatized by the Patriot mythology of 1991. Early Patriots were celebrated publicly, then savaged by analysts like Theodore Postol (from the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment), who argued the real intercept rate in the Gulf War was far lower than claimed: Patriot missiles were claimed to have a Probability of Kill of 97% by President Bush, only to have later analysis show it was more like 10%. That skepticism didn’t vanish; it metastasized into broader missile-defense doubt.

So when PAC-3 started missing in high-visibility tests, critics pounced. In 2002, after four straight intercept test failures, the program faced loud questions about whether production should continue at all. Arms Control Today documented the miss streak and the pressure to justify the system’s effectiveness before scaling. GAO also critiqued elements of the PAC-3 program’s assumptions and affordability math, adding to the sense that the whole thing was shaky.

And yet: PAC-3 is now one of the most important air and missile defense interceptors on earth. It’s been deployed globally, upgraded iteratively into CRI and MSE variants, and is combat-proven in real air-defense networks that matter right now. It became indispensable because the Army kept testing through the valley of embarrassment instead of folding under it.

Fighter Mafia vs. the cathedral

The “fighter mafia” story gets retold as mythology, but it’s useful here because it shows how institutional antibodies work. John Boyd and his circle didn’t just have different taste in fighters—they challenged the Air Force’s self-image. Their thesis was heretical: you win by trading speed and complexity for maneuverability, energy dominance, and pilot-centric design. In the 1960s and early 70s, the Pentagon establishment resisted them hard, because their ideas implied that prior priorities were wrong and that the procurement priesthood was failing. The internal battle over F-X specs and the Lightweight Fighter program is well-documented.

What emerged—after years of infighting, compromises, and the usual “it’s too radical / too cheap / too risky” sneering—were the F-15 and F-16 lineages. We all know how this ended. The F-15 has an unmatched air-to-air combat record, and the F-16 became the standard-issue multirole fighter for half the planet. The heretics won because reality was stronger than bureaucracy.

Sprey and the F-35: yesterday’s genius fights today’s war

Then the wheel turned again. Pierre Sprey—once part of that lightweight-fighter insurgency—spent the 2000s as one of the loudest public executioners of the F-35. His critique leaned on maneuverability, weight, cost growth, and schedule chaos—it was basically “the F-16 playbook worked, so why are we leaving it?” He said it in interviews, articles, and the usual circuit of defense-skeptic media.

Some of those complaints were fair about acquisition dysfunction; many of them missed the actual threat environment. Fifth-gen isn’t fourth-gen-plus. It’s a different game: stealth, sensor fusion, and electronic warfare don’t show up in a dogfight chart, but they decide whether a dogfight happens on terms that kill you. Combat use has borne that out. Israel’s F-35I has operated at depth in contested airspace, repeatedly demonstrating the payoff of low observability and advanced avionics. Ask the Iranians—politely or otherwise—how comforting Sprey’s turn-rate math feels under a stealth strike.

Bringing it all together

“Truth passes through three stages: first, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as self-evident.” —Schopenhauer

The pattern is almost boring:

1. New system is hard.

2. New system fails publicly.

3. Critics mistake developmental pain for terminal weakness.

4. The same system becomes doctrine once it survives long enough to finish becoming itself.

AMRAAM. PAC-3. F-15/F-16. F-35. Now Anduril -and every other new defense start ups systems for that matter. Same shit, different decade. Different acronyms, identical reflex.

Why the reflex exists

The defense ecosystem has a built-in preference for a certain kind of failure: slow failure, hidden failure, papered-over failure. It’s comfortable because it stretches accountability so thin that no one has to own anything. If your program is five years late and three times over budget but you hit every PowerPoint milestone, you get promoted. If your program is on schedule because you break things in rapid test loops, you get subpoenas. If you want a vignette of this in action, look no further than yet another clip from Silicon Valley but for Defense, Pentagon Wars:

That sounds cynical until you watch procurement close-up. The Pentagon is a risk-management machine that evolved for budget politics, not for wartime iteration. Its immune system treats embarrassment as existential. A startup appearing on the front page because a drone augered in during a test is a social failure in that worldview, even if it’s a technical success because it creates learning velocity.

And that is the core mismatch with Anduril’s (and any new defense company’s) DNA. They are explicitly doing “fail forward” development in public. They ship, they test, they film the crash, they tweak the stack, they ship again. Reuters and WSJ treat that as proof of immaturity. I treat it as proof they’re on the right planet.

There’s another mismatch layered on top: the press loves a morality tale with a villain and a comeuppance. A venture-backed defense company with a $30 billion+ valuation is a perfect target. You can write the headline before you interview anyone. You can borrow all the old Silicon Valley tropes—move fast and break things, arrogance, youth, gamer culture—and transpose them onto national security for clicks. That’s what we’re watching right now.

Testing Failures are a Feature not a Bug

Controlled, instrumented failure is literally how engineering works when the stakes are high and the physics are rude. You do not get to skip the valley of wreckage. If you’re launching interceptors, you’ll miss some. If you’re building new seekers, you’ll chase ghosts. If you’re deploying autonomy into hostile EW, you will get jammed, spoofed, and surprised. The only question is whether you learn faster than your adversary learns to kill your ideas.

AMRAAM became AMRAAM because it was allowed to go through 80s/90s test bruising, with GAO breathing down its neck. PAC-3 became PAC-3 because the Army kept firing after public misses. Boyd’s worldview became F-16 reality because a small group kept pushing after the cathedral said “no.” F-35 capability became obvious because pilots flew it into the real threat and didn’t die.

This is not romantic. It is the cost of building weapons that work on the first night of the next war.

Why I’m cheering for team Anduril

Root for them. Pressure them to keep testing harder, faster, and closer to realism. Demand that the learning loops be tight and that the failures be used. But don’t confuse the existence of failure with the existence of fraud. That’s a category error that only helps our enemies and our internal straphangers.

The status quo in defense is not neutral. It is a competitive disadvantage wrapped in ritual. Every time we punish a program for acting like a program under development, we teach the next one to hide, slow down, and optimize for optics instead of capability. That’s how you wake up in 2027 wondering why your adversary has mass-produced autonomous systems you’re still writing test plans for. We can’t afford that.

Anduril isn’t perfect. No one who pushes the envelope is. But they are pushing into the seam where modern warfare is headed: autonomy, low-cost mass, rapid refresh, software-defined lethality. If that sounds like the future, it’s because it is. The people trying to stop them aren’t defending excellence. They’re defending process.

Godspeed, gentlemen.

Wither cost plus?

Pete Hegseth (the newly rechristened Secretary of War) rolled out this week a dramatic revise and redraw of the nation’s military acquisition plumbing. Entitled “Transforming our warfighter acquisition system to accelerate fielding of capabilities” this memo directs the department to pursue a new paradigm of acquisition.

The acquisition reforms announced mark more than a bureaucratic tweak—they represent a tectonic shift in how the U.S. military will move from concept to combat. It recasts the acquisition enterprise as a “warfighting-first” engine, the architecture of procurement is being rebuilt around speed, flexibility and outcomes. It creates and empowers new Portfolio Acquisition Executives (PAEs) - who will now be expected to stay in there jobs for five years or more- with broader latitude to move money and cut the dead weight of programs, the entrenched hierarchies of the traditional system are being challenged. At its core the reform says: we will no longer tolerate a procurement system that erects process over performance; instead, we will expect field-ready capability—with contracts that reward rapid delivery, vendors who invest to scale, and an export regime designed not just to sell but to surge. It also puts legacy defense contractors on notice that the days of the government footing the bill for all their R&D are numbered.

Yet the long-term impact rests on whether culture and incentives align with these ambitions—or whether old habits simply rebrand themselves in a new structure. If acquisition officers are still rewarded for check-boxes rather than combat impact, and if industry treats this as yet another rework rather than a sea change, the promised value may slip through soft deadlines and softer accountability. Defenders of the status quo in both industry and the Pentagon’s “frozen middle” may choose to just burrow in and wait this out. After all, haven’t we heard this routine about reform from every other administration?

But if the reforms take root, the defense procurement ecosystem might finally pivot: becoming not just a buyer of equipment, but a builder of readiness and resilience. The question now is whether the system will move as fast as the threat demands—and whether reform will mean a real liberation of capability, or simply a new label on the same old machine?

A completely different operating system

Our existing DoD (now DoW) acquisition framework is the product of decades of band aids upon band aids to try and ameliorate the obvious structural problems of Cost Plus contracting and the poorly competitive defense ecosystem that Shyam Sankar calls a monopsony (basically a cartel of contractors known as the Big six primes that eat 98% of defense contracts). This administration spent about five minutes staring at this hot mess and decided it needed to be shot in the head.

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts here and here, the operating principle of this administration is a bias towards moving everything to personality driven systems (with strong relationships and accountability) rather than process driven ones. The guiding philosophy is an action bias (vs a caution bias) and that people are easier to hold accountable than processes. This new set of directives epitomizes this in many ways.

Juxtapose this with the Trump administration philosophy: they view external interests as an asset, not a liability in negotiations. Case in point: when attacked for having large conflicts of interest in negotiating the recent Israel/Iran proxy cease fire due to their substantial financial interests in the Middle East, Jared Kushner shot back on him and Middle East Envoy Steve Witkoff’s behalf: “What people call conflicts of interests, Steve (Witkoff) and I call experience and trusted relationships that we have throughout the world…If Steve and I didn’t have these deep relationships, the deal that we were able to help get done, that freed these hostages, would not have occurred.”

“Where there is no conflict, there is no interest” - Larry Sonsini, Silicon Valley Macher, patron saint of the Trump administration , founder of the law firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati.

Since I’m not attempting to judge but rather explain, I’ll leave out the editorializing on whether this is right or wrong. What is true is that this philosophy is 90 degrees orthogonal to how DC has been wired to think in the modern bureaucratic era, and is a mindset more in line with how entrepreneurs and business people think. That being said, expect some antibodies from the blob - the counterforce of bureaucratic inertia of the status quo.

For those that don’t know, no process is sufficient

The last administration (and most others before it all the way to Hoover) put their trust in creating complex processes with checks and balances that tried to idiot proof acquisitions great and small and prevent corruption. While they tried to create a perfect system that was incorruptible it had the drawback of slowing things down often to the pace of continental drift and as a rule left key functions in the hands of nameless “committees” with no sense of ownership. It also had the unintended consequence of creating a vacuum of accountability that created a huge amount of maneuvering room for shenanigans by those who wanted to use the system for their own agendas - whether that be keeping zombie programs going or frustrating efforts to uncover deficiencies, there were options galore to blunt or misdirect those trying to deliver a product on time and on budget. This hillarious skit from The Pentagon Wars (the greatest HBO movie of all time) brilliantly lampoons this from the real story of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle program, with a little Hollywood literary license:

In the over twenty years I’ve been in the industry, I’ve watched time and time again as decisions that should have been handled by accountable individuals were instead delegated to committees or slipped behind because there were too many stakeholders seeking unattainable consensus and no single person in charge who “owned it”. Another frequent occurrence was the procurement officers letting their SETA contractors (“ie the experts”) filibuster you with endless questions that were never satisfied because they got paid by the billable hour and the procurement officer was too afraid of being penalized for making the wrong decision.

Or take a cost control system like earned value management: intended to more accurately capture an estimate of costs of a project in completion. For those untrained in it however (most normal humans), it just creates a quagmire of accounting gobbledy gook that a witty cost account management can use to literally rebaseline his metrics every month and thereby obscure any cost growth under a mountain of planning packages until it becomes too hard to hide the lack of progress anymore. By the time that happens, he’s usually been promoted and on to his next role and the company made 12-14% fee the whole time!

There is an obvious misalignment of incentives in a system driven by the fact that making yourself personally accountable and then being wrong was a formula for career suicide, whereas kicking the can down the road, covering up the mess and not making a decision allows you to go the next role unscathed.

History of Acquisition Reform

Setting the stage for where we are today, the roots of today’s acquisition dysfunction trace back to the Robert McNamara era of the 1960s, when the Defense Department adopted “cost-plus-fixed-fee” contracting as the default model for major programs during the Vietnam War. McNamara’s Planning, Programming, and Budgeting System (PPBS) centralized control and tried to apply corporate rationalism to defense procurement, emphasizing quantitative analysis and “systems management.” (Defense Acquisition University – A Short History of Acquisition Reform) While intended to align incentives with performance, the cost-plus regime created perverse outcomes: contractors faced little penalty for overruns, and program managers optimized for compliance rather than capability. By the late 1960s, scandals in aircraft and ship procurement revealed ballooning costs hidden within opaque contracts. The system’s logic of bureaucratic control over market discipline set the stage for every reform that followed.

The first serious effort to break this pattern came with the President’s Blue Ribbon Commission on Defense Management, better known as the Packard Commission (1985–86). Chaired by Hewlett-Packard cofounder David Packard, the commission was convened amid a series of public procurement embarrassments like $600 toilet seats and $400 hammers that symbolized runaway waste. Its 1986 report found that defense acquisition was crippled by “diffuse authority and excessive oversight” and recommended empowering acquisition executives, consolidating accountability, and refocusing on performance rather than process. Many of these recommendations shaped the Goldwater–Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act (1986), which streamlined chains of command, strengthened joint operations, and institutionalized the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition as a central authority.

In the mid-1990s the next wave of reform arrived with the Clinger–Cohen Act of 1996 (also known as the Federal Acquisition Reform Act, among other titles). This law was aimed in part at modernizing Federal procurement, particularly information-technology acquisition, but its provisions also applied to broader agency acquisition policy. It established stronger roles for agency CIOs, linked investment to mission outcomes and pushed for commercial item procurement and streamlined procedures. These changes reflected the recognition that reforms to organization and oversight (from the Packard era) had to be matched by procedural reforms to contracting, evaluation, and vendor engagement if cost, schedule, and performance challenges were to be addressed.

Yet the reforms were overshadowed by one of the most consequential scandals in modern defense procurement: the Darleen Druyun affair. As the USAF’s acquisition executive, Druyun negotiated a large tanker contract while simultaneously arranging employment with the contractor, Boeing. She eventually pleaded guilty to conflict-of-interest violations, received a prison sentence, and Boeing paid a major settlement of $615 million. That scandal helped catalyze a renewed emphasis on ethics, conflict-of-interest safeguards, and contract transparency. The acquisition framework in place today reflects both the procedural reforms of the 1990s and the lessons learned from high-profile corruption cases like Druyun’s.

By the 2010s, with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan driving urgent operational needs, the pendulum swung once more toward speed. Programs like Ash Carter’s Lightning Initiatives and later Better Buying Power initiatives during the waning years of the Obama administration attempted to capture innovation without repeating past excesses, introducing agile contracting, cost caps, and “should-cost” management. Each reform wave oscillated between efficiency and control, urgency and oversight—always shaped by the ghosts of earlier scandals. The result is today’s acquisition framework: an uneasy compromise between the Packard Commission’s quest for managerial clarity, Goldwater-Nichols’ joint imperatives, and the Druyun-era vigilance against corruption. It is a system built as much by scandal as by design, perpetually trying to reconcile the competing demands of speed, accountability, and trust.

My take: if you want to understand the behavior, look at the incentives

The acquisition structure we have today was designed to put safeguards around the inherently flawed Cost Plus Incentive Fee (CPIF) contract model set up under McNamara: a perverse system which frankly privatizes profits and socializes losses. The system may have started as a way to encourage contractors to take on high risk projects by assuring them they won’t go bankrupt by doing so, but over time it has tweaked into the most nefarious form of corporate welfare with little incentive for large corporations to take on risk.

Because programs experiencing schedule delays effectively keep marching on at the same level of funding, there is no incentive to deliver anything on time. The joke we used to have when I worked at big primes was that “the satellite’s primary mission isn’t to do something in space; as far as accounting was concerned it’s to sit in the high bay and collect change orders until the customer can’t take the political heat anymore and demands you launch it.” Pretty much my whole time there I got to hear people bitch and moan about how it made no sense and everyone hated it. Hegseth’s office, for good or for bad, decided to flip the table on the incentives and take the first steps towards blowing them up.

One example of a “band aid” Over the past 15 years (2011–2025), with roughly 70–80 active Major Defense Acquisition Programs (MDAPs) at any given time and about 25 Nunn–McCurdy breaches, roughly 30–35% of all major programs have triggered the statute’s cost-growth thresholds — a reflection of persistent overruns despite decades of reform. According to Congressional Research Service data (2012–2021) and recent DoD disclosures on the Sentinel ICBM program’s (the second largest acquisition program in history after the JSF) critical Nunn-McCurdy breach in 2024, this pattern has remained consistent.

By contrast, the “big six” primes are operating at record profitability: Northrop Grumman reported 12–14% operating margins in 2025 [Northrop Q3 2025 Earnings], while RTX (Raytheon Technologies) marked its sixth straight quarter of year-over-year segment-margin expansion [RTX Investor Update]. Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Boeing Defense, and BAE Systems all posted multi-year-high margins and backlogs exceeding $900 billion collectively. The contrast is striking: nearly a third of the Pentagon’s biggest programs breach cost limits, even as the firms delivering them enjoy their strongest financial performance in decades.

By moving to firm fixed price model as the rule rather than the exception and trying to follow commercial procurement models where ever possible, there is certainly more risk because contractors may miscalculate the cost of execution - meaning there a non-zero chance they may go bankrupt in the process of trying to deliver a critical system to you. However, procurement officials are already trained to look at these risks holistically when making a procurement decision and second sources can also help mitigate these risks. Creating a healthy defense ecosystem with many venture backed and private equity backed players who could take over in such an event is another mitigation. Indeed, today we have a robust group of investors specifically seeking high risk investments with high returns (called Venture Capitalists with trillions under management) which can help fulfill the demands of high risk projects- CPIF structures designed when government, not the private sector was the main driver for R&D spending in areas like aerospace and electronics are obsolete.

Conclusions

There is risk involved in shifting from an acquisition process that is primarily cost plus with many checks and balances and processes to one more reliant on individuals empowered to use their own judgment to move fast and break things. There is absolutely no way to deny that.

The reformers driving these changes are best to re-read the lessons of the past like the Druyun scandal to find ways to align incentives against such behaviors and make sure they don’t let them happen again under their watch. Pentagon Inspector General offices are going to need to be further resourced and given more power to police these newly empowers PAEs to ensure we don’t have a return to the dark days of past procurement corruption. Congress is also going to need to take action through pending legislation like the FORGE and SHIELD acts to take a lot of these administrative changes and write them more permanently into the US Code.

For those that know, no process is necessary

For those that don’t know, no process is sufficient

- Mantra on an Engineering Fellow’s white board, circa 2012

Today’s status quo is terminally unsustainable and our own tolerance for the monopsony of present defense contractors bears much of the blame. In a tremendous case study published by Bismarck Analysis Raytheon is Now Run Under the Portfolio Theory of the Firm Samo Burja unpacks the situation in one of the big six brilliantly. The salient quote: “The defense industry thus enjoys neither the benefits of vertical integration and scale nor the benefits of Darwinian free market competition. The resulting inefficiencies are excused and continually enabled by generous financing from Congress and little to no effective auditing of the Defense Department.” To change the defense industry requires changing the customer structure that it supplies and that may require a radical revise and redraw what Hegseth is proposing.

The present status quo is more designed for peace time political engineering than it is to rapidly field and adapt systems at a pace that the war in Ukraine has shown we are far from adequately set up to do. Something had to be done. 70 years of building companies in Silicon Valley have shown that small teams united behind a mission, cultures biased towards action rather than caution, and individual accountability as a cornerstone are the only way to achieve great things. Indeed, when government worked well like during the height of the Apollo program, it was exactly this same sort of virtues that existed in it in spades. So with that in mind, I am hopeful that we will see some dividends from these badly needed reforms, even if they are not risk free and represent a massive cultural paradigm shift from how we do procurement today. We need it if we are going to stand a fighting chance in a future near peer conflict.

For decades, America and our allies have had the luxury of presuming a permissive environment in the electromagnetic spectrum. In that time we have become increasingly reliant on the spectrum for sensing and sensemaking, command, communications and control in an increasingly wireless and autonomous battlefield. As I have discussed ad nauseum here and in other publications like the Wall Street Journal, the pervasive nature of jamming and interference on the 21st century battlefield has turned that spectrum into a no man’s land that is degrading or outright denying our ability to operate effectively in the other maneuver domains - land, sea, air and space.

With the 21st century battlefield becoming more fragmented, decentralized and filled with autonomous systems, the spectrum has emerged as a cross domain of warfare that connects all the others. If we are to stay relevant, it is as vital that we develop the ability to not just survive but thrive in the cross domain of spectrum warfare.

As the battlespace becomes increasingly dominated by autonomous systems, the spectrum has become the 5th domain of warfare that we must not survive in but thrive in. To understand how we can achieve spectrum dominance, we must first understand the problem. The Spectrum Imperative has 10 parts, perhaps best though of as the 10 commandments of 21st century electronic warfare:

WE MUST:

1. Assume the spectrum will be contested

2. Admit we have a problem

3. Build systems that survive in disrupted communications

4. Bring EW to the tactical edge

5. Train as we’ll fight

6. Turn signals into targets

7. Modernize our electronic attack capabilities

8. Prioritize EW immunity in acquisition

9. Enable coalition spectrum interoperability

10. Be ready in all domains

While we don’t claim to have all the answers, we do hope that by at least scoping and decomposing the problem we can help drive solutions to ensure spectral superiority in the 21st century. This ties into the new mode of maneuver operations: suppression and destruction of enemy emitters and networks (SEEN/DEEN) which CX2 has chosen to build our first products to ensure.

Sometimes a video is worth a million words and the rendition below of our concept of operations (masterfully crafted by our friends on 8VC’s graphics team) is a vignette into how we seeing this type of electromagnetic maneuver operations playing out:

Building integrated systems of systems that can play out like the vignette above will require thought leadership from all levels: the warfighter, the acquisition community, defense policy and industry.

Stay tuned here as we dive deeper and deeper into the different faces of the spectrum imperative. CX2 will continue to shine a light on the problem and propose solutions where ever we can.

Last week, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth released a memo “Establishment of Joint Interagency Task Force 401” which sought to fix a gap in how Counter UAS systems are tested, evaluated and procured across the DoD.

Reporting directly to the Deputy Secretary of Defense, the new task force is authorized to field tech rapidly, tap $50 million per effort without delay, and hire specialized staff from S&T labs plus counter-UAS experts across the services. Replicator 2 is absorbed into the new unit, and the Army and Pentagon partners get just one month to carve out a secure workspace and prepare FY 26 budget requests. This isn't just a reshuffle—it’s a hard pivot toward speed, agency, and unified action in the face of an accelerating threat.

The memo took aim at a long standing problem: the organization within the Army which is the central touch point for CUAS across the DoD, the Joint Counter small UAS office (JCO), at present has a lot of authority to test and evaluate CUAS systems but lacks sufficient budget authority to contract outside vendors to develop and procure them. All they can do is test & evaluate and slap a label of “JCO approved” on solutions, while relying on other organizations like the Army Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies office (RCCTO) to use OTA and other contract vehicles to acquire and maintain these systems. This is somewhat emblematic of the “authorization vs appropriation” split that exists all over the DoD (you need both to proceed with something but the two come from different sources) which slows down roll out of new systems and leads to lots of internecine fighting over budgets and authorities.

This split has led to hundreds of potential CUAS solutions languishing on the wrong side of the “acquisition valley of death” with customers/warfighters saying they want their solutions but lacking the means to procure them. Meanwhile, our adversaries are literally buying drones by the millions while we are barely outfitting our front line units with Counter UAS systems capable of defeating them.

“The small UAS threat continues to grow exponentially and is becoming increasingly sophisticated. The number of DoD organizations involved in C-sUAS since…2020 has increased, and those organizations often are unconnected to each another. DoD needs a single focal point to centralize, coordinate, and lead these efforts.” - memo establishing JIATF 401

How did we get here?

For years, C‑UAS felt like the red‑headed stepchild of DoD acquisitions—a critical but under‑loved mission that splintered across stovepipes. Counter‑UAS work traces a lineage from JIEDDO (born from Joint Counter‑IED efforts in the mid‑2000s) now evolved into JIDO, which later took on small UAS threats. The real structural pivot came in 2020, when the Secretary of the Army—acting as DoD’s Counter‑Small UAS Executive Agent—stood up the Joint Counter‑Small UAS Office (JCO) under Army G‑3/5/7, partnering with RCCTO. JCO was meant to streamline doctrine, requirements, materiel, and training—but lacked procurement authority, largely sticking to test and evaluation, fielding demos, and endorsing vendor systems without the capital to pick up the tab. That fueled a chaotic landscape of vendor solutions and too‑many fledgling C‑UAS firms stranded in the acquisition valley of death.

The establishment of JIATF 401 today signals a tacit admission that evaluation and acquisition can’t live in silos. JIATF 401 is created to report directly to the Deputy Secretary of Defense, armed with rapid acquisition authority, hiring flexibilities, and consolidated funding that could push counter‑drone tools out into the field at speed the threat. The message couldn’t be clearer: if we want scalable, deployable C-UAS at warfighter speed, you assemble capability, authority, and resources under one command. That’s the hard lesson—and hard pivot—this reorg embodies.

A couple other key details behind this effort: existing service specific CUAS projects, such as IFPC-HPM (which encompasses Epirus’s Leonidas Block II), Army M-LIDS or X-MADIS are likely not included under this, since they have existing program offices. So called SOF peculiar procurement is also exempt so Special Operations Command still has flexibility to move quickly within its own mission scope. But all new RDT&E efforts go under JIATF 401.

Testing limitations are a pacing item for new development

While it’s great to see this effort getting started and real money getting put behind rapidly solving one of our most urgent capability gaps, JIATF 401 still has more work to do. While the memorandum calls for identifying and creating dedicated C-sUAS testing ranges in a months time, the spectrum authorizations for actually operating jammers and wider bandwidth radios on these ranges will also need to be addressed.

At present, there are few, if any places in CONUS where CUAS and GPS jamming can occur persistently. Anyone using a GPS jammer in the lower 48 for longer than 15 minutes at present can expect an angry call from the FAA due to the perceived need for pristine spectrum access for civilian use due to our highly congested and dynamic airspace. This may require NDAA language and reforms to the FAA charter through legislation in order to fully fix.

Even the most ambitious ranges and exercises can run into economic and geographic limits so it’s important that we don’t ignore modeling & simulation development either. Efforts like AFRL’s Digital RF Battlespace emulator program should be expanded to allow us to evaluate the efficacy of effectors and detectors in large one v many autonomous system scenarios such as swarm on swarm operations.

Expanding industry access to test ranges

We also need to make it easier for industry partners to access CUAS ranges on a regular cadence without being paced by the DoD. One of the things I was most surprised by when I went to Ukraine was how quickly CUAS manufacturers were able to get onto government test ranges and immediately evaluate low TRL tech - from the outside its very tightly integrated, yet informal and almost effortless.

Contrast this with US ranges which can take many months to coordinate and get the authorities and sponsorships to operate on. Exercises such as TREX, Silent Swarm and others can often times take nine months or more of planning to get a low TRL product on a range to test. Juxtapose this with the one month procurement OODA loop in Ukraine and you can see there is a gap here. The reason its possible is because their approach is much more relationship (“Yuri has a reason to be here and the range is open”) than process focused (“please fill out these 25 forms and talk to the central planning authority at the flag pole - they’ll get back to you in six weeks”) and we should take notes.

Perhaps the closest analog we have to the Ukrainian model is CRADAs. We need more meaningful CRADAs (Contractor Research & Development Agreements) in place so upstarts, startups and established players - with the attention and resources behind them - that can access the CUAS range for continuous experimentation without the availability or attention of an overstretched government POC being the pacing item.

Leveraging the full western enterprise

DoD is also not the only part of the US government buying Counter UAS systems. Homeland Security is also looking at their own $100M CUAS acquisition program with multiple buys through an IDIQ. How tightly integrated will this be with DoD’s JIATF 401? There are many similarities for DHS mission vs DoD (My spidey sense is there is about 85-90% commonality amongst requirements), but some differences. DHS has a larger focus on apprehending the subject rather than destroying the drone (shoot the archer, not the arrow) and is more gun shy about collateral damage due to operating over the homeland - which may make them favor more reversible/electronic attack vs kinetic effects. Nonetheless, DHS should be able to heavily leverage JIATF 401 resources to drive economies of scale and mature promising tech faster.

Finally - we need better integration with our allies across NATO, Ukraine and our partners in the Indo-Pacific like Australia, Japan and Korea to fully leverage all their lessons learned, learn how to integrate with disparate and diverse systems as a fighting force and increase the economies of scale of the industrial base.

CX2 just returned from the Pacific Futures Forum in Tokyo this past week and one of the consistent themes across all the panels from our allies was tighter systems integration across forces. Japanese Self Defense Forces (JSDF), Norwegian and UK ships are operating in formations together and even going as far as to integrate individual air platforms on to each other’s ships for the first time so that they can operate more seamlessly as a single fighting force. Our drone forces across the allied fleets are even further away from this reality. With the Chinese building 70-80% of global drone production a year and adding the equivalent of the entire Royal Navy to their own Navy every year, our ability to integrate UAS and CUAS systems across all allied nations will be even more critical to staying in the fight longer through greater depth in future near peer conflicts.

• * *

So to summarize: JIATF 401 is a huge step in the right direction, but more work remains to be done to ensure that we convert this new found urgency and consolidated decision making into lethality.

This past week, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth publicly signed (with Metallica background music) a directive “taking the department’s bureaucratic gloves off” of US military drone production and fielding.

The directive, entitled “Unleashing US Military Drone Dominance” comes weeks after President Trump’s June executive order to streamline and modernize our nation’s drone laws, “Unleashing American Drone Dominance” (that’s two levels of unleashing). The Hegseth directive outlines several policy changes and directives to occur in the next 30-90 days:

• Arming combat units with a variety of low-cost drones

• More widely integrating UAS into training exercises by 2027

• Each service will create program offices focused on UAS, especially small UAS.

• DCMA is going to assume a role in Blue UAS with joint management from DIU.

• Identify programs that could be cheaper or more lethal if replaced by drones.

• Form experimental formations purpose-built to enable rapid scaling of small UAS across the Joint Force by 2026, w/ INDOPACOM taking first priority

• Designate at least three national ranges, with diverse terrain (at least one with over-water areas) for deep UAS training, w/ low/no inter-service cost transfer.

All of this is absolutely wonderful and long overdue. It’s about damn time we started to try and catch up with our adversaries like China, which just placed an order for 1 million kamikaze drones to be delivered in 2026.

But it’s also important that in the interest of speed we don’t rush headfirst from one problem into another: the simple reality is that most American drones have not been rigorously tested to work in the dense electronic warfare environment of Ukraine nor recent Middle East conflicts. Worse than that, we lack doctrine, equipment, ranges and procedures to even test them thoroughly in the presence of dense jamming and interference.

The struggle is real when our systems come into contact with the EM hellscape in Ukraine. Many first generation drones outright failed to even take off due to interference and jamming. Most have difficulties with interference from similar drones used in close proximity on the same frequencies - a phenomena known as RF fratricide. Modular payloads and warheads frequently can suffer from cosite interference (different radios interfering on the same platform), conductive susceptibility (bus emissions compatibility/instrument noise) and perhaps even HERO (spontaneously blowing up due to RF interference) issues.

Part of this is that we built many of America’s drones backwards: because we started development in permissive environments, we didn’t build in features for operating in an EW environment from day one. Even worse, once we figured this out, it was hard to find places to test UAS and Counter UAS systems in the US - due to FAA and FCC restrictions on airspace and spectrum use - and as such, testing is infrequent and we currently lack uniform procedures for how to properly test drones. As one test lead for the Navy’s only test & evaluation squadron for drones, UX-24, confirmed for me last week “there is no department wide memo on uniform UAS and counter UAS testing”.

As drones rapidly come into widespread use we must take steps to develop uniform procedures to rigorously model, simulate, test and evaluate these systems to develop a deep understanding their capabilities and limitations in the complex electronic environment of electronic warfare - drawing inspiration for what we do for radar sensing and jamming systems on aircraft with appropriate tailoring.

If you don’t think the Taiwan strait will be an EM Spectrum Operations Hellscape even worse than Ukraine, I’ve got a bridge in the Jiangsu province I’d like to sell you. Our drones must be prepared to survive and thrive in this environment - or else we are just building lots of cheap cannon fodder for our adversaries. We prove this through rigorous modeling & simulation, testing and evaluation. Building drones and systems that can survive and thrive in the EM battlefield of today and tomorrow is the raison d’etre for CX2 and a lifetime passion project for yours truly.

Potemkin Combat Validation

To their credit, many sUAS manufacturers from US and Europe recognized Ukraine as a proving ground and have been willing to iterate through failures on the battlefield to prove their upgraded systems work there. However, this leads us into our second problem: “combat validation” without rigor to prove something works across the range of military operations isn’t combat validation at all.

“It worked in Ukraine” has turned into almost cliche. Pilot deployment in a combat theater is necessary but not sufficient for wide scale deployment.

The Ukrainians have been getting smarter about Westerners just showing up to “check the box” on combat validation. “…They (Western firms) do beautiful pitch books, beautiful presentations about how they’re operating in Ukraine. But actually they’ve done just a couple of flights in Lviv [the western city more than 1,000km from the front line]…The big problem, after that, is that billions of dollars go to the companies that still don’t have any idea what they’re doing.” said Roman Knyazhenko, CEO of Ukrainian drone firm Skyeton in a particularly damning piece in the past week’s Telegraph. This is a recurrent theme with Ukrainians we talk to: western defense co’s showing up to do the testing equivalent of seagull management and then bugging out after fairly benign testing to “check the box” of combat validation for marketing purposes- that’s why the Ukrainians are so cynical about western UAS and CUAS systems.

Rigorous systems engineering is necessary to prove that combat validation wasn’t just a result of cherry picking conditions under which you flew in theater so that your drone would be guaranteed success. Without running a system through full test, simulation and evaluation conditions, purely empirical results and phony validation like “It worked in Ukraine” tells you nothing about how something will work throughout the full range of military operations, from moderate RFI to massive jamming and interference. Even the Ukrainians, who have been building and flying in this environment lose over half their drones to jamming and accidents, driving them to tethered drones to take out high value targets.

During my time in Ukraine, I collected statistics on the success of our drone operations. I found that 43 percent of our sorties resulted in a hit on the intended target in the sense that the drone was able to successfully fly all the way to the target, identify it correctly, hit it, and the drone’s explosive charge detonated as it was supposed to. - Jakub JacJay, “I Fought in Ukraine and Here’s Why FPV Drones Kind of Suck”

For combat validation to be meaningful, it must occur under conditions that are understood to be rigorous and there has to be some degree of data collected can be at least somewhat recreated in simulation and test, ideally by a third disinterested party. The long term benefit: those same tests and simulations can be used to test new systems and improvements building confidence in performance without having to roll the dice again and hoping it works in combat.

Iterative prototyping vs. Agile vs. Waterfall

In venture backed start ups (especially software ones), there is a race against time to get a product into pilot with a real customer and generate feedback based on their experience. This is an essential part of the agile development process (shown below). Compare and contrast this with the linear waterfall process which traditionally is used for hardware development (see below).

This is perhaps a key gap worth highlighting between the agile approach and the waterfall approach to development: while agile development embraces piloting systems with real world customers as quickly as possible to receive feedback, it can sometimes lack the verification a product works over a wide range of conditions before widespread deployment. For consumer products, it’s ok to let the customer be your guinea pig and do some of your defect discovery (to a point); for systems people’s lives are depending on, not so much. The desperation of the wartime situation in Ukraine has forced a lot of UAS product teams to have a higher tolerance for defects out of necessity, but that is by no means ideal. The reality is that combat validation without verification leaves us with major gaps in our understanding of system capabilities and limitations we may fill in later the hard way. With each design iteration adding more, the level of fidelity in our testing and simulation must increase as well, particularly if the product is in widespread use.

Verification vs. Validation

The traditional waterfall approach to weapons and system development from the DoD is way too slow for the current era of consumer scale warfare and agile development/iterative prototyping is necessary to keep up with a rapidly evolving enemy. However, historical DoD testing systems such as the IDAL Research Program at AFRL or the Weapons Systems Evaluation Program can potentially serve as a roadmap for how we can design a rigorous test framework that enables validation results to feedback into the verification process and build confidence that we are building the right thing. These studies also serve another key function: providing real world validated estimates of essentials like Reduction in Lethality (RIL for jammers), Probability of Kill (Pk for missiles) and exchange ratios (for fighter aircraft) which can be used in force planning and budgets. We have to find a happy medium between the need to move quickly and avoid non-value added paperwork exercises and the need to be able to determine and predict system effectiveness without putting real lives at risk.

We have to find a happy medium between the need to move quickly and avoid non-value added paperwork exercises and the need to be able to determine and predict system effectiveness without putting real lives at risk.

A key cornerstone of good iterative prototyping is to develop a full suite of simulation and testing systems that you can rapidly implement a systematic verification procedure on every time you make a change and determine results before you fly. SpaceX makes this a cornerstone of everything they do and it shows in their unprecedently high reliability for launch. Tools like hardware in the loop (HITL) and software in the loop (SITL) simulators and flight test ranges filled with jammers using containerized and characterized techniques for jamming to test against enable systems to be verified and validation runs checking against results observed in a wartime environment. Add to this the accessibility of new enterprise software tools like Sift, Epsilon3 and others, which give an engineer unprecedented observability into how a system is functioning, and these processes can be done orders of magnitude faster than they have in the past.

Bringing the drone down for landing

“It worked in Ukraine” should be necessary, but not sufficient for drones arming US forces. We have spent decades developing a robust modeling & simulation, testing & evaluation and verification & validation framework for missiles, radar EP and radar jamming, as well as for communication systems and other sensors. We have factor spaces, detailed threat laydowns and a long history of FME/FMA (foreign military exploitation and analysis) to determine exactly how effective enemy sensors and jammers are so that we can allocate funding to address different technologies to help solve the problem and also so that we can build robust Tactics, Techniques and Procedures (TTPs) to defeat them.

We need to use a framework like the Weapon Systems Evaluation Program (WSEP) we use for missiles as inspiration and create a new verification and validation process for the “attritable” weapons category that drones fall in - firmly rooted in ensuring they can operate in an EW dense environment. Perhaps a full blow T&E gauntlet doesn’t make sense for $1500-$50k drones, but a modicum of this level of systems engineering rigor could go a long way towards supporting accurate force planning and ensuring our troops understand the capabilities and limitations of our own systems. The ease of set up and use of SITL, HITL and simulation tools should make this relatively easy and inexpensive for the services to set up in collaboration with industry.

CX2 will continue to be at the forefront of this, both building systems to survive and thrive in the EW dense environment of the 21st century battlefield and the software and hardware tooling to prove they do while iterating rapidly. We will also continue to advocate for the services to receive and or develop the resources, ranges and procedures to help industry do this and provide independent verification and validation. Nothing short of our warfighters lives depend on it. We need rigorous EW testing for our drones - and fast.

In case you were living under a rock last year, you probably watched in awe the past few days as Israel once again taught a masterclass in 21st century warfare. Using a combination of strike aircraft, cyber and electronic warfare, targeted assassinations by Mossad and drone strikes conducted at scale from deep inside Iran, they have managed to largely neutralize not just the ability of Iran to threaten them with nuclear weapons, but also the regime’s ability to retaliate.

It’s becoming increasingly obvious that despite years of preparing to see it coming, Israel, in a good cop/bad cop dance of diplomacy with the US, managed to achieve complete strategic surprise. Israel managed to achieve this through a combination of intelligence and special operations fusion, including the pre-positioning of precision strike assets deep inside enemy territory. As Doug Livermore of the Atlantic Council pointed out in a brilliant article he published this week: “The most striking aspect of Operation Rising Lion was Israel’s ability to achieve tactical surprise through pre-positioned assets rather than relying solely on standoff weapons or penetrating strikes.” This is a revolution in modern warfare with parallels going all the way back to the Greeks and their trojan horse.

“The most striking aspect of Operation Rising Lion was Israel’s ability to achieve tactical surprise through pre-positioned assets rather than relying solely on standoff weapons or penetrating strikes.” - Doug Livermore, Atlantic Council

The IDF and Mossad basically managed to eliminate all the middle management of the IRGC and other units, damage/neutralize the nuclear enrichment facility at Natanz, neutralize their air defenses, neutralize the Iranian air force, eliminate >1/3 of their ballistic missile launchers and now we are hearing that the Ayatollah is also in hiding and being compartmentalized from command by the remaining generals- all in 72 hours.

The Israelis did this not through brute force, but through a triumph of intelligence. They relied on SIGINT, HUMINT, Cyber, Electronic Warfare and other means to precisely track their targets and remove the functioning decision making architecture the regime had in place.

Prior to the start of operation Rising Lion (Am Kalavi), Mossad literally smuggled an entire salvo of FPV drones and Spike Precision Loitering Munitions deep inside Iranian territory where they used them to neutralize what remained of their Russian built air defenses and conducting precision strikes on Iranian leadership.

“What we are witnessing (in recent weeks’ attacks) it the triumph of intelligence over brute force”- Cedric Debernard, Canadian Intelligence Analyst

With the remaining IADS neutralized, Israeli warplanes were free to do what they do best: hunt and kill Iranian transport erector launchers (TELs) and Shahed drone launches. As the table below shows, with each subsequent day of the war, the IAF and Mossad are uncovering more and more launchers and destroying them. Subsequently each night the volume of strikes is shrinking.

The amazing effectiveness of intelligence over brute force, of precise autonomous strike systems operating from behind enemy lines with tightly integrated intelligence should give us pause as we begin massive investments to put up our own ballistic missile defense system: the golden dome. While eliminating the threats from ballistic missiles is wonderful, we must also be vigilant about strikes from unmanned systems within our borders as well.

It does us no good to build a Golden Dome around America only for a future adversary to attack us with a Trojan Horse.

History Repeating Itself within a Fortnight

The heavy use of FPV drones to high value targets from deep inside enemy lines comes less than two weeks after the Ukrainians pulled off a similar operation they called Operation Spiderweb, which I wrote about in last week’s Substack. The parallels with the Ukrainian operation, which made heavy use of drones smuggled into Russian territory to target and destroy Russian strategic bombers are striking. Right down to self destructing the launchers when they were done using them:

The Israelis took Operation Spiderweb and put it on Steroids. In addition to the drone and loitering munition operations, the also used insider intelligence gathered by double agents that gave them precise information about the Iranian command echelon’s movements to round up their targets. The irony was of course that many of these assets were kept around by the Iranians because they thought they had actually flipped them when they hadn’t.

There are also reports that Israel may have even used false communications traffic to summon Iran’s top air force commanders to meet in a particular location which they subsequently took out: “We carried out specific activities to help us learn more about them, and then used that information to influence their behavior,” the official told the outlet. “We knew this would lead them to meet — but more importantly, we knew how to keep them there.”” The extent to which the Iranian military has been decapitated in such a short period of time is extraordinary and raises doubts about the viability of the regime.

Maximum pressure must be complimented by Maximum Support (for the Iranian people)

In March I had the privilege to attend a small audience with the Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi at the Upfront summit in Los Angeles. He made the case that while maximum pressure through sanctions and military force were necessary to bring down the regime, in his opinion they weren’t sufficient. He talked about how maximum support for the Iranian people - through the form of organizing and support from abroad were necessary to help finally overthrow the regime. He also carried this message to several world leaders, including Bibi Netanyahu, which explains why Bibi always makes it a point to address the Iranian people separately from the regime.

What does this “maximum support” look like? Well Elon Musk took a positive step by turning on Starlink within Iran, enabling external communication not going through the Ayatollahs. Another form could be to encourage labor strikes and other civil disobedience that would prevent the regime from functioning. The crown prince is right to point out the role of the Iranian people in potentially bringing this war to a close. They have suffered under 46 years of oppression and they must be on board with any change towards a more pro-western posture. Hopefully some of the same forces we saw come out during the Persian Spring over fifteen years ago are still dormant and ready to rise up lest other more radical forces take charge instead.

A “Golden Dome” strategy looking only at threats from outside our borders is a 21st century Maginot Line

Preliminary estimates range widely for what the Golden Dome- intended to defend the American homeland against ICBMs, Hypersonic Vehicles and Cruise Missiles from abroad - will end up costing. The down payment listed in the FORGE act is $25B for this year, with timeframes and estimates for finishing it ranging from three years and $165B to 20 years and $542B.

Golden Dome is obviously aimed at stopping a massive Chinese or Russian launch where we presently have only the deterrence factor of mutually assured destruction to rely on. It’s an enormous investment which builds on our existing Ground Based Interceptor program which took over two decades to deploy - and presently has less than three dozen operational interceptors on the west coast with a Probability of Kill (Pk) of about 56% based on real world tests. Fortunately, Kim Jong Un or the Iranians are unlikely to launch more than a couple dozen missiles at us so it could be useful in these “mad men” scenarios.

Meanwhile, we remain largely exposed to a possible attack by drones launched from inside our borders just like we saw in the last two weeks. A small percentage of shipping containers and trucks entering our country are actually searched, we have millions of foreigners living inside our borders and the parts to execute a strike like what took place in Russia are mostly procurable off Amazon and other eCommerce sites. How much added money is allocated in the FY2025 budget for CUAS? As the table below shows, DoD requested $1.276B.

That $1.276 billion must be split amongst R&D of new systems as well as procurement of existing ones that defend our units in the field and all of our bases and critical infrastructure and sites. While this is a major step up from previous years CUAS spending, it still feels like given 300+ bases in the US alone to defend, not to mention other targets of interest (stadiums, airports, power plants, refineries, etc) and the extent of the threat, a two or three multiple on these figures is warranted, or whatever funding the industrial base can bear. At the very least, we should do some bottoms up analysis on the real cost of defending all strategically important targets against drone threats and just how many assets it would take.

In case it wasn’t obvious, the past 30 days have shown us that a strike from within our borders from coordinated drone swarms could be every bit as debilitating as a limited ICBM strike - and possibly even harder to defend against.

Unfortunately, it’s only a matter of time before we face a massive drone strike from within our borders — and unlike the Golden Dome, the technology to effectively counter drones is much more mature and available for procurement today. We should demand that Congress and DoD weight the threat appropriately when allocating resources. Because a Golden Dome cannot protect against a Trojan Horse.

Now onto this week’s news of a Ukrainian massive drone sneak attack behind Russian lines, with familiar themes like penetrating enemy supply and logistics chains and using them against them like Israel’s devastating attacks on Hezbollah last year and leveraging drones launched from Shipping Containers as we talked about in the penultimate edition of this Substack.

A Daring Sneak Attack From Behind Enemy Lines

Dubbed Operation Spider Web, the Ukrainians appear to have pulled off a quite daring assault with targets as far east as Siberia, with some sources claiming as much as 1/3 of it’s strategic airpower may have been destroyed. Here’s some amazing video of the strikes underway shot from one of the FPV drones participating in it (note the use of truck tires on the wings as camouflage and to confuse automatic target recognition algorithms from drones and overhead satellites):

Early reports are saying five bases, including a submarine base and four air bases were hit. The BBC reports (map below shows the sites)):

“Sources in the SBU earlier on Sunday told the BBC in a statement that four Russian airbases - two of which are thousands of miles from Ukraine - were hit:

• Belaya in Irkutsk oblast (region), Siberia

• Olenya in Murmansk oblast, Russia's extreme north-west

• Dyagilevo in central Ryazan oblast

• Ivanovo in central Ivanovo oblast”

There are additional reports include the city of Severomorsk (also in the Northern province of Murmansk) and home to nuclear submarines was on the list, but have yet to be confirmed. The targeting of Russian strategic nuclear delivery sites is a major escalation but shows that the Ukrainians are off the NATO/US leash. Perhaps even more upsetting for the Russians, many of these assets such as Tu-95 Bears (seen in the video above) and A-50 Mainstay AWACS aircraft are irreplaceable as their production lines were long since shuttered.

Order of Battle

Ukrainian officials are reporting that this operation took over a year to plan and carry out, with offices even set up across from FSB (Russian Intelligence) headquarters in some regions. Drones were brought in through Kazakhstan along with wooden crates used to build launchers and final assembly reportedly took place in Chelyabinsk near the Kazakh border, according to Russian reports. SBU (Ukrainian intelligence) sources describe the whole operation as extremely logistically complex: "The SBU first smuggled FPV drones into Russia, followed later by mobile wooden cabins. Once on Russian territory, the drones were hidden under the roofs of these cabins, which had been placed on cargo vehicles…At the right moment, the roofs were remotely opened, and the drones took off to strike the Russian bombers."

Some pictures have been leaked by SBU of this being mechanized. Apparently Russian truck drivers were completely oblivious as to the contents of the trucks, only to be redirected in route by an unknown caller on where to stop and where to park…hmm.

In case you’re wondering what the final drones look like in attack configuration: Richard Woodruff is holding one below: a 15” drone with an RPG-7 based warhead and COGS cost of about $430.

Using their own cell networks against them

Scattered reports by Russian Military Bloggers on Telegram indicate that the Ukrainians bypassed the need for ground stations in favor of LTE modems to connect directly to the internet via the Russians own cellular networks:

For those of your who don’t speak fluent Russian (thanks ChatGPT):

“All of this could have been avoided — if mobile internet had been disabled in time ❗

Now, regarding today’s screw-up from a technical point of view:

1. The FPV (first-person view) control was carried out via mobile networks (4G, LTE, and the like). The bandwidth of modern mobile networks is more than sufficient to handle such tasks.

2. There were no ground control stations, let alone any sabotage operators, nearby. The truck driver specifically, and the logistics chain as a whole, is a separate matter that our security services will need to investigate.

3. The FPV drone was controlled using a software-hardware solution (system) called ARDUPILOT. The exact same setup is used on “Baba Yagas” (a nickname for certain drones), except instead of a Starlink terminal, there's an LTE modem with an Ethernet output, which connects to a single-board PC like a Raspberry Pi or Orange Pi. A webcam is connected to the PC, streaming video, and control commands are transmitted to the drone via the ArduPilot UART channel.

ArduPilot is used on platforms that require flight stabilization and maximum autonomy in control — including under conditions with high latency in the operator-drone or drone-operator communication channel. In other words, this exact setup was chosen because the operation was conducted over internet channels.

4. The brilliance of this operation lies not in any technical uniqueness (both sides of the conflict use such solutions), but in the organizational-logistical aspect — amplified by total local-level sloppiness when it comes to providing even basic security measures.”

Baba Yaga’s use Starlink to serve as a relay for deep strike drones that communicate directly through two way radio link (The Baba Yaga is a Ukrainian Group II drone built by CX2 partner Skyfall.) The use of cellular networks such as 4G and LTE to communicate with drones directly through the internet, potentially putting the operator anywhere in the world but on the battlefield has been a potential nightmare scenario for many years and one I touched on in a previous post. LTE modem kits for drones are now readily available through vendors such Sky Drone, DJI and ElSight. Rumors are that the Ukrainians held “LAN parties” from thousands of miles away with all the 117 or so pilots in the same room to better coordinate strikes!

It’s highly likely that the Russians will spend a large portion of the next few weeks trying to figure out how to install some sort of “kill switch” into cell stations near targets of military interest, so this may not work forever. It’s hard to fall for the Trojan Horse ruse twice.

Aftermath

“This is exactly what wars of the future will look like.” - Iryna Vereshchuk, a top official in Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s office

Based on preliminary intelligence, the operation seems to have had a devastating impact on Russia’s limited fleet of strategic bombers, destroying as much as 36%. We’ll keep an eye out as the pencil gets sharpened on this.

SAR imagery from commercial satellites confirms some of the damage, showing at least 4 Tu-95s destroyed at Belaya field:

Both sides appear to be escalating, with the Ukrainians reporting immediate follow up strikes into Russian and Russian occupied areas by more drones and the Russians launching overnight drone strikes into Zaporizhzhia . It’s unclear how Russia will escalate any further, particular if a large portion of it’s strategic bomber fleet is neutralized. What is certain is that much like the weather, summer is heating up.

Wrapping it up

US military planners are likely watching and taking notes, it’s not much of an imagination to change Russian names on crates for Chinese ones, and boats for ships, as seen in the graphic below:

Indeed, it was only a few years ago that science fiction outlined the nightmare scenario no one wants to think about: the same sorts of drone swarms striking on US soil:

Hopefully US force planners are taking whatever plans they had for Golden Dome and thinking about reprogramming some of it for internal UAS defense, because as we just saw in Russia, $7B in priceless equipment can dissappear from a surprise attack from 150 drones in a few minutes anywhere in your territory if you aren’t prepared to stop them.

LOS ANGELES, May 20, 2025 -- CX2, a defense technology company building intelligent, multi-domain electronic warfare (EW) capabilities for the tactical edge, today announced a $31 million Series A funding round to accelerate the development and deployment of its next-generation EW systems. The round was led by Point72 Ventures with participation from existing investors Andreessen Horowitz and 8VC as well as new investors 201 Ventures, Pax Ventures and Upfront Ventures.

Modern warfare has created an urgent challenge for U.S. forces operating in contested electromagnetic environments. As demonstrated in Ukraine and other recent conflicts, adversaries have invested heavily in electronic warfare capabilities while U.S. systems have atrophied after decades of underinvestment.

CX2 is building a portfolio of attritable, machine learning-powered electronic warfare solutions that enable the complete kill chain—from sensing to strike. Their enterprise platform and autonomous systems help warfighters rapidly locate, target, and neutralize electromagnetic threats at the tactical edge, even in contested and communications-denied environments. This provides commanders with real-time threat response capabilities at reduced cost.

“We are honored and excited to be partnering with Point72 Ventures to accelerate the development and deployment of our next generation electronic warfare products, which will help ensure US spectral dominance on the 21^st century battlefield,” said Nathan Mintz, CEO and Co-Founder of CX2. “Chris and his team are phenomenal partners with unique insight into the defense space and we are thrilled to have them join 8VC and Andreessen Horowitz.”

"We believe electronic warfare represents one of the most critical capability gaps in U.S. defense," said Chris Morales, partner at Point72 Ventures. "CX2's approach to building attritable, intelligent EW systems align perfectly with what we see as the future of warfare. Their team combines the right mix of defense tech experience, RF engineering expertise, and software talent needed to build a next-generation EW prime."

The funding will accelerate the development of CX2's product suite and enable the company to expand its team, which has grown from four founders to more than twenty employees in its first year.

To learn more about CX2 and see open roles, visit www.cx2.com.

About CX2:

CX2 is a defense technology company developing intelligent, multi-domain electronic warfare capabilities for the tactical edge. The company builds attritable, machine learning-powered EW solutions that enable the complete kill chain, from sensing to strike, helping warfighters rapidly locate, target, and neutralize electromagnetic threats even in contested and communications- denied environments. CX2’s enterprise platform and autonomous systems provide commanders with real-time threat response capabilities at reduced cost, addressing critical capability gaps in U.S. defense. Founded by a team combining defense tech experience, RF engineering expertise, and software talent, CX2 is focused on ensuring spectrum dominance on the modern battlefield. For more information, visit www.cx2.com.

Readers who tuned in for my last post will recall a list of critical technologies and products that I outlined that must be developed, matured and deployed for us to move from First Person View (1 v 1) to Real Time Strategy (1 v many) on the battlefield and beyond. Despite what the science fictions authors may have you believe, autonomous drone swarms still are a very nascent technology.

The list (which I by no means claim to be exhaustive) is rehashed below:

1. Real time command & control at scale

2. Control Abstraction Layer (going from high level commands to complex maneuvers)

3. Intra-drone communication and coordination

4. Robust local precision navigation and timing (independent of GPS at least intermittently)

5. Tendering: how are these drones deployed, recharged and resupplied at scale

Last week I covered #1 and touched on #2. This week I’ll be diving into #5: all things tendering since this is an area with quite a bit of activity and upstarts and mature players alike are trying to answer the question: how do we deploy and maintain all these drones? For folks that are still trying to figure out how to make autonomy work at even a 1v1 scale, tendering may seem a long way off, but figuring out the physical infrastructure is a huge part of how we deploy at scale. We may be a ways off from the Protoss Carriers from Starcraft shown in the video below, but there are plenty of impressive intermediate systems to share.

Amateurs study tactics, professionals study logistics - Napoleon

Drone docks

We have docking stations for Roombas, for our phones and laptops. Why not for drones? Major drone manufacturers in the US and China have started to roll out “drone in a box” solutions for commercial and security drones. These provide drone storage, drone charging and command and control in an easily deployable system with a retractable dock. Skydio has it’s drone dock product, Emergency Responder Drone company Brinc has it’s responder station and of course DJI has their own dock product as well. These are all singular instantiations (i.e. one drone per dock) but could easily be mounted on roof tops or as DJI’s promotional video shows, readily transported in the back of a truck (conceivably the others are capable of this as well.

The prize for best drone dock marketing however, goes to A2Z Drone Delivery, that made this almost Hollywood quality video showing their vision for drone docking and deployment at scale (pretty remarkable for a bootstrapped company). Others like Zipline, Volansi (acquired by Sierra Nevada) and several others are also in the space and will be deploying their products commercially at scale in the next couple of years.

For drones to actually be deployed at scale for logistics or commercial delivery, docks like A2Zs will need to become as ubiquitous as Amazon fulfillment centers or intermodal trucking hubs.

Aerial Drone Carriers

Speaking of Amazon, they made waves back in 2016 when they were awarded a patent for a “airborne fulfillment center utilizing unmanned aerial vehicles for item delivery”. My understanding (from talking to people hired to continue working on this) is that Amazon is continuing a low level of work on the concept, but filed the patent defensively so that no one else could jump on the claim while they waited for the technology to mature further.

This concept is in some ways over 100 years old: in the early 1930s the US Navy experimented with a pair of blimp aircraft carriers - the USS Akron and the USS Macon. Both airships were lost in storms, with the only evidence of their existence being the massive hangars at Moffett Field (in Mountain View) and a few other places throughout the coast.

The Ukrainians, driven by pure necessity have built and deployed their own drone carrier drone of their own: the Dovbush. This drone is capable of carrying up to four kamikaze drones, which it can command via either radio or a shorter range fiber optic tether. The video below shows this system in action. Launching from a mothership brings with it the advantage of more robustness to jamming and being able to leverage more exquisite systems for navigation, data links and longer range versus what the smaller drone can do on it’s own.

The Chinese have a Group IV (Predator sized) drone called the Jiu Tian, which includes an “Isomeric Hive Module” suspected of being a drone tendering unit. This would give the Chinese the ability to deploy drone swarms well beyond the FLOT (Forward Line of Own Troops).

The US military meanwhile has focused its attention on programs such as Enterprise Test Vehicle (ETV), also known as the Rusty Dagger program. While mostly focused on deploying missiles with a 500NM+ range at scale, the Rusty Dagger is intended to launched from the back of a C-130s or similar cargo aircraft, perhaps as many as dozens at a time. This is a natural outgrowth of the DARPA Gremlins program from about a decade or so ago which showed the potential for launching a small air force from the back of a C-130 and then recovering the drones if desired.

Anduril’s Barracuda missile program and Zone 5’s Rusty Dagger were both downselected earlier this year for the next phase of this fly off. With the defense innovation money pumps potentially being cranked wide open with the new budget, it will be interesting to see where this lands.

Mobile land based drone carriers

Land based carriers are also starting to be fielded at scale on the battlefield. Since about 2016, the Chinese have fielded a drone carrier truck capable of launching and controlling up to 48 of its CH-901 attack drones, as shown in the video below.

The Russians have also fielded several drone trucks of their own. Surfacing in the Kursk offensive last year the Kub-SM by Kalashnikov includes tendering and command and control capability for up to 16 drones (2 recon drones and 14 attack drones). Kalashnikov boasts that it can also launch fiber optic drones, which would be timely given their current popularity due to the ubiquitous jamming environment seen in heavy fighting in Kursk and Kharkiv in the last 12 months.

The Kub-SM joins the Multi-Launch Drone System (MLDS) on the battlefield, which carries up to 16 tube launched versions of the popular Lancet kamikaze drone.

It’s highly likely that both of these Russian systems were inspired by the Iranian Shahed-136 deployment truck, which has become a mainstay of military parades in Iran. The Russians have become the beneficiary of a great deal of drone tech transfer from Iran, including setting up large scale production of Shaheds in Russia.

Perhaps the most famous and oldest example of a drone delivery truck is the ground system for Israeli Aircraft Industries (IAI) Harpy drone. First fielded in 1989, the Harpy was in many respects the first loitering munition and came equipped with an anti radiation homing seeker. The Harpy is often deployed in a truck mounted magazine of up to 10 missiles, as shown in the figure below:

Most of the innovation in the US market has been for commercial use, with relatively few military entrants into the military drone tender truck market (so far). A few US companies are actively marketing Drone tendering systems that can be mounted on trucks. One outfit called Accelerated Media Technologies is marketing a “Mobile Tactical Drone Operations” truck capable of launching a single tethered drone from a shelter on the roof.

In 2018, a US firm, Workhorse Aero, a subsidiary of Workhorse Trucks (make EV delivery vans), was awarded a patent for a drone delivery system from a truck they called Horsefly. This may have been a case of being too early to market, as Workhorse Aero has since pivoted out of the drone manufacturing business.

The only military focused firm I’ve been able to uncover so far is Airrow, a small firm in the San Fernando Valley which recently won an Air Force Phase I SBIR to deploy a drone tendering system on an unmanned ground vehicle. This is basically a ground version of the Ukrainian Dovbush, with two degrees of UAS supporting each other.

Drone Carrier Ships

While US Supercarriers are slowly adding Drones to their air wings, like the MQ-25 Stingray which is meant primarily as a refueling platform, the rest of the world is busy building specialized ships for fielding drones at scale. Most US drone carrier efforts have been focused on folding into the existing NavAir concept for the manned air wing. Other countries without a long history of carrier aviation have been busy looking at alternatives, however.

The English went so far as to commission a study of the feasibility of the drone carrier concept almost 20 years ago with BAE Systems working on the so-called the UXV Combatant program. This was eventually shelved in favor of just folding in UCAVs and other drones into the existing carrier air wings on the two Queen Elizabeth Class Carriers they presently operate.

The Turks recently launched the TCG Anadolu, a ship which can carry anywhere from 30 to 50 drones, including the Bayraktar TB3, a drone designed for carrier launch and recovery and the more advanced Bayraktar Kızılelma, a purportedly low observable (stealth) jet powered UCAV (unmanned combat aerial vehicle). The fact that Turkey was the first is likely due to its exclusion from the F-35 program which forced them to develop alternatives. Also the Bayraktar drones built by Baykar have seen heavy combat action in both Ukraine as well as Azerbaijan, giving them significant lessons learned to fold back into these systems.

The Iranians recently launched their own drone carrier, the Shahid Bagheri. Refitted into a drone carrier from it’s start of life as a cargo carrier, the Shahid is purported to carry drones that are smaller versions (60 or 25% scale) of it’s jet drone projects. Equipped with a launch ramp like most non CATOBAR (catapult launch) carriers, it’s highly likely that this project the same sort of prestige act/vaniety project that Iran is notorious for, with extremely limited military utility.

Finally, the Chinese have gotten quite a bit of attention from the launch of it’s Type 076 Amphibious Assault Ship, the Sichuan. This drone ship is massive - as large as an America-Class Light Helicopter Carrier - 50,000 tonnes and 800+ feet long. Little is publicly known about the system though it’s purported to have a “drone first” airwing and electromagnetic catapults capable of operating larger (Group III or IV) UCAVs. It’s highly likely that this first of it’s class ship will serve as a test bed for drone carrier operations and tactics for an all drone air wing. I hope we’re taking notes. Great video below if you have 15 minutes:

Bringing it all together - drones all the way down

As drones become more and more ubiquitous, the logistical challenges of launching, recovering and tendering them at scale will be as big of an issue as any. In particular, the desire to make other unmanned platforms as launch platforms for aerial drones will give us a bit of a “turtles all the way down” feel to 21st century warfare. Imagine an autonomous ship launching smaller autonomous boats, carrying unmanned ground vehicles with drone launch systems of their own? Kind of reminds you of this classic meme a bit, doesn’t it?

Entirely new lines of logistics will have to be considered to carry the energy capacity to charge or refuel all these unmanned systems, repair them if possible and ensure their software is up to date. The tendering is only one (significant) part of the challenge however: command and control at scale and intra-drone communications also need to be solved for and will be the topic of my next entry.

As a #Childofthe80s, I have fond memories of all the 486 era video games I played as a kid - Sid Meier’s Civilization (the original!), Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Mechwarrior, Starcraft and of course, Command & Conquer. I was such a nerd I even took a course in college on the history of computer game design at Stanford and wrote a term paper on Civilization and it’s evolution.

The VGA era - I remember it fondly - back when NVIDIA built shitty video cards for us to play first person shooter games instead of GPUs that fly real First Person View drones on the battlefield.

What’s been interesting is to see how these wargames have shaped our generation’s perception of warfare. Most of these action and strategy games fell into one of two categories: First Person Shooter (FPS) or Real Time Strategy (RTS).

Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Mechwarrior, Flight Simulators and later games like Call of Duty and Halo firmly fell into the FPS category. These games are firmly in the 1v1 category. On the other hand, RTS games like Command & Conquer and Starcraft (Zerg!) introduced us to the concept of 1 v Many - the ability to draw a lasso around many assets on the gameboard and give high level orders to the group which they would then use to move, regroup or attack an enemy cooperatively.

While FPV has moved from video game war to the real battlefield and become the cornerstone technology of the Ukrainian air war in much the same way the Surface to Air Missile defined Vietnam or the Jet Fighter defined the Korean war, RTS has yet to really make the leap and true 1 v many drone swarms have yet to really reach the battlefield.

In this piece I will outline the current state of the art in swarm technologies, outlining both the AI/software challenges as well as the logistics challenges and how they are starting to show up on the battlefield.

The dual use case of drone shows

Drone shows have quickly become a popular alternative to fireworks shows at the holidays, especially in places with access to lots of cheap drones like China. Check out this Guinness World Record show in China with 8000 drones at once!

Tools like route planning and waypoint modes (where a drone flies out to a specific point in space and stays there) have become table stakes for virtually all off the shelf drones at this point, starting all the way back at DJI Phantom 4 (or maybe even earlier) in 2016/2017. Commercially available software like that made by Drone Show Technologies allow these to be programmed and controlled.

These drone shows are not without significant limitations, however. They are completely dependent on command and control, GPS and have little or no ability to be dynamically tuned on the fly. If they lose datalink or GPS, the consequences can be utterly disastrous, as this failure in Orlando (which sent an innocent bystander to the ICU when a drone fell on him) shows quite dramatically:

Logistically these swarms are a headache too: with lots of labor required to stage the drones prior to flight, charge their batteries and maintain them. It’s best to think of these systems as the alpha version of where this technology will eventually go.

Moving from drone shows to true swarms

For drone swarms to really reach their full potential, a few technologies have to be integrated into the product that are at various stages of maturity:

1. Real time command & control at scale

2. Control Abstraction Layer (going from high level commands to complex maneuvers)

3. Intra-drone communication and coordination

4. Robust local precision navigation and timing (independent of GPS at least intermittently)

5. Tendering: how are these drones deployed, recharged and resupplied at scale

There are probably a few other technologies that should be added to this list I haven’t even thought of. For instance, when pilots transitioned during World War I from shooting pistols and shotguns at each other to mounting machine guns in line with the pilot, a synchronization gear had to be invented and integrated so you wouldn’t shoot your own propeller off!

Each of the bullets above could easily take up a whole substack (or indeed an entire book) by themselves, so let me start by unpacking the first two: real time command & control and abstraction - I’ll leave the others for future posts.

Real time command & control at scale

Drone shows are pre-programmed with minimal ability to change them on the fly. Step one is to make this dynamic and get the drones to run pre-programmed routes from a set playbook the user can select from. The best analogy I can think of to this is actually from another video game I played in college: Madden NFL 2k3.

Going to canned plays (Courses-of-Action or COAs to use the preferred military nomenclature) has the advantage of minimizing the cognitive load on the user and also the communications load on the network. It’s also significantly more complex architecturally. In addition to precise knowledge of every drone’s position, speed and heading, for precision maneuvering the drones (or the controller) may need collision avoidance sensors and software to avoid running into each other.

Depending on the architecture, this may still require a good datalink to manage a substantial amount of centralized command and control and precision PNT. In non-permissive environments this may not be a foregone conclusion- due to ubiquitous Counter UAS and GPS/Counter-PNT jammers comprising the so-called disconnected, denied, intermittent and/or with limited bandwidth (DDIL) environment.

Abstraction

One benefit of this kind of abstraction is that, much like the offensive line in Madden shown above, the drones can be pre-loaded with a set of ready to execute COAs. A simple command could be uplinked to each drone “Hail Mary” or “Quarterback Sneak”.

Many 20th century weapons datalinks, like Paveway, AMRAAM and Patriot, had bandwidth limited at rates that made a 2800 Baud modem (remember those?) seem luxurious. They use semaphores and similar techniques to manage things like dynamic retargeting and target cue updates. Drones could follow a similar approach at scale. Indeed systems like Group III and above UAS have been doing this using protocols like STANAG 4586 to this for a while now.

So sacrificing precision may be a makeshift solution here and using design patterns that have worked successfully for sensors trying to make sense on the battlefield from a common operating picture with limited bandwidth makes a lot of sense to apply to the drone problem.

Pre-loading some of the COAs into the drones in the swarm will allow you to get away with more limited command bandwidth and intermittency (as little as a single command may suffice) for things like simple formations and regrouping. Unless these COAs are themselves “waypointed” (that is hinged at certain static decision points in time and/or space) using robust mission planning and keep out lanes, the amount of “smarts” the individual drones need to have for terrain following/terrain avoidance, collision avoidance with other drones and increases dramatically.

Products working towards the solution

At CX2, we are spending a lot of time thinking about how we can do this at scale for an “electronic wall” in the spectrum - allowing multiple drones to scoop up signals on the battlefield, identify and fix on them and if necessary destroy them- all in the DDIL environment. Coordinating all these systems for precision fires and dynamic tasking as assets come on and offline is indeed a key part of our Nexxus operating system, shown in the graphic below.

But we are not alone amongst US contractors in thinking about this problem. Gambit, a DC based defense start up, has been looking into how to integrate multiple drones to generate what they describe as “tasking outcomes”. Overland AI, an autonomous ground vehicle company, has also rolled out its Overwatch platform that similarly does routing and dynamically planning for vehicles that have the smarts to avoid colliding with each other. So does Shield AI Commander and Anduril’s Lattice for Mission Autonomy

What Next?

Next post I will go more into depth on intra-drone coordination and maneuvering, focusing on AI terminal guidance systems. I’ll also talk about GPS denied navigation and what makes it hard, as well as get into some of the drone tendering systems that we are starting to see entering the battlefield and the commercial market as well.

Silicon Valley is tapping into the know-how of war-trained drone makers; ‘no U.S. company is keeping up with Ukraine’

By Heather Somerville

March 11, 2025 9:00 pm ET

Read more here

“Southern California startup CX2 last year struck a deal to put its software and sensors on Ukrainian drones, a matchup that has received approval from a branch of the U.S. military and might soon arm American forces.

“No U.S. company is keeping up with Ukraine,” said CX2 co-founder Nathan Mintz. “You know their stuff works. They’ve got the ultimate high-stakes laboratory meant to battle-proof all this stuff.”

The Defense Department’s interest in Ukrainian drones underscores the challenges that have beset American drone startups and the achievements of the Ukrainians since the Russian invasion. Despite the Pentagon’s view that small, autonomous drones are essential and a funding priority, the sentiment has failed to spur an American drone-industry boom.”

TRL 5 usually means a component has been tested in the lab under partially relevant environment conditions. But if something is “proven in Ukraine” that would seem to imply it is “flight proven” and had been used downrange to kill something. That’s usually an instant check mark for TRL9, as Figure 1 shows.

Or here’s another banger from a press release of a unnamed company: “With over 1,000 hours of TRL-9 operation, XXX has demonstrated world-class range against targets…as well as other cutting-edge capabilities like anti-jamming technology.” For a surveillance system, that’s a whopping 6 weeks of continuous use - barely enough time to really figure out if things are working or not - and I doubt the anti-jamming was tested over the full envelope of employment either (short range, long range, etc).

So…are these examples TRL 9 or TRL 5 or TRL 6 or what? You’d be surprised how many different opinions you’d get out of a room of “experts” on this topic. The TRL process has been a quagmire as long as I’ve been in the industry: it’s an attempt to apply a hard quantitative number and criteria to something that’s by it’s very nature highly subjective and a lot of judgement calls. In this respect its very similar to other subjective industry measures such as Quality Functional Deployment, or the House of Quality (also the name of my future Six-Sigma themed restaurant).

When everything was cost plus, satellites cost billions of dollars and took many years to build, and launch was a perilous endeavor, maybe a robust TRL system, guided by a robust waterfall engineering process with this many steps made sense. But in an era where deployment schedules are weeks long, changes are being made to systems 6x a day thanks to the advent of 3D printing of hardware and Continuous Integration/Development (CI/CD) of software, and launch vehicle failure rates are <0.3% , perhaps the TRL definitions and process for appraising them have become OBE (Overcome by Events)?

History of TRLs

TRLs were developed by NASA in the 1970s as a way to manage complex space projects and understanding the technical risk that was being undertaken. Originally there were only 7 TRLs but in 1989, TRL 6-9 were elaborated upon to further flush out what paces a system should be put through on orbit. Since then they’ve been adopted by every branch of the military and they’ve put their own unique twist on it (e.g. the navy takes out “flight” test as a criteria because boats don’t fly). This system was in many ways an outgrowth of the times it was developed in: NASA had endured a series of failures in the 60s, 70s and 80s (as I’ve talked about before here) that left them with dead astronauts and failed missions and was looking for a way to manage and reduce obvious risks, like developing and introducing new technologies.

However, straight forward process and simple, if not properly constrained, inevitably becomes a vehicle unto itself for bureaucratic bloat. It becomes a jobs program for the managerial class. TRLs were no different and alongside the TRL system a bureaucratic morass known as the Technology Readiness Assessment process has developed, with its own 98 page guidebook and extremely prescriptive definitions for all these technologies. This would all be funny if it weren’t for the fact that these processes and satisfying their abstract requirements have become a cottage industry largely unfocused on the ultimate goal: delivering cutting edge systems to the customer as quickly, affordably and reliably as possible.

For those that don’t know, no process is sufficient.
For those that do know, no process is required.
- random brain dropping from an engineering fellow’s whiteboard circa 2011

The process for formally defining the TRL of a system is rather straight forward: the product is assessed and all technologies to be used are divided into Critical Technology Elements (CTEs) typically at the Subsystem level, but sometimes at the component level. For instance, if there is a new type of rocket engine, it’s almost certainly considered a CTE. If it’s a missile seeker, it’s possible the whole seeker could be considered a CTE or perhaps one component that is very new, like a high power amplifier made from a novel material like Gallium Nitride (GaN), is considered a CTE. Those considered immature (typically less than TRL8) The contractor is then required to develop a series of “Tech Maturation Plans” which take each of these CTEs from whatever TRL they started with to at least the minimum of TRL 6 (system test completed in a relevant environment) required to get into production.

For major programs like new missile buys, a new submarine or a fighter jet, the systems engineering and program management team at the contractor and it’s subcontractors will typically spend 6-24 months (and millions in billable hours) fighting back and forth through a series of working groups with various “experts” in the Systems Program Office (SPO) and their supporting Systems Engineering and Technical Assistance (SETA) contractors on the specific definitions of the CTEs and their associated tech maturation plans.

Because the SETAs are usually awarded a contract to the SPO proportional to the size of the contract in the next phase, the SETAs are somewhat incentivized to make this as complex as possible to maximize their required support. The type of folks that gravitate towards SETA work tend to be the kind (read bureaucratically minded) who lean towards more complex processes which they believe are more likely to minimize “escapes”. Making matters even worse, the SETA has no authority (that still rests with the program office and its contract officers) but can endlessly pontificate, sandbag, pout and otherwise suck the oxygen out of the room until they get their way on these things because they are “the experts”.

“The bureaucratic mind has two needs: to achieve the financial goal set for it, and to keep being employed. With employment comes a pension, perks, status, a title and the chance to move up in the organization.” - Dr. John R Taylor, Canadian Journal of Plastic Surgery, 2009

Most contract officers, who are incentivized to minimize risk up until the very point they’ve blown their budget (no one gets promoted for blowing up a rocket early and under budget), will defer to the SETAs they are paying for valuable “advice”. Since most of these contracts are Cost Plus Incentive Fee, the contractor is also incentivized to make them more complex at the corporate level, even if it’s frustrating to the engineers working on it who just want to push a product out the door and see it work.

To make matters even worse, incremental contract milestones are often tied to the tech maturation plans, with maximum incentive to have as many steps as possible so billing can occur as front loaded and incrementally as possible. This fits with the “legacy prime” or cost plus mindset of getting paid by a customer to product paper rather than product.

From a taxpayer perspective, the Tech Maturation Plans all too often minimize risk BUT they do so by maximizing the time to field a product and thereby the cost - marching army costs on these programs can run in the millions per day and all too often the critical path is paced by tech maturation plans. As Elon is fond of saying “the cost of time outweighs the cost of cost.”

My own Tech Readiness Assessment experience

I’ve briefed or helped prepare briefings for at least four technical readiness boards (TRBs) - a requirement for any major defense acquisition program (MDAP - >$500M in RDT&E or $3B in procurement) to move beyond technical demonstration (TD) prototyping to Engineering and Manufacturing Development (EMD) - something referred to in the DOD organizational bible known as JCIDS Milestone B.

In the case where I was the main briefer, this involved a full coat and tie all day briefing in July in front of a “murder board” of 40 so-called subject matter experts. The TRB panel members ranged from former fighter squadron commanders, to former DARPA PMs, to a retired brigadier general to a number of SETAs to test pilots. Impeccable credentials!

So I spent 45 minutes (x2) briefing the tech maturation plans we had already performed or intended to perform for our particular CTEs. My management ensured that my talking points were so rehearsed I sounded like a politician answering an uncomfortable question. Since TRL is much more of an art than a precise science and every test wicket and subsystem is different, the TRB panel members all came with their own pet rocks and agendas. Since the risk level of a team’s offering going forward - a key criteria for how a Request for Proposal (RFP) is scored - was heavily influenced by the TRB’s finding, careers were made or broken based on what happened in this briefing and if you could tell a story you were TRL 6 or not.

Of course, so I thought. As if to amplify the absurdity of all this the executive in charge of my program team literally fell asleep and started snoring loudly in the front row halfway through my briefing - highly distracting when dodging pet rocks being thrown at you. His junior executive just waved it off and gestured at me to continued. Well at least I know he’s not worried about me.

After 9 hours of briefings the TRB then met to individually vote on what they thought the true TRL was of all our CTEs. Having gotten to see the tabulation afterwards, I found this result highly amusing. For some (usually less political) CTE they were remarkably consistent and 90% of the results were the same or at most +/- 1 from each other. For others, the results varied as widely as 3-8 in some cases, with the personal agendas of the reviewers again creeping in. It was clearly that the direction to run an “objective” process was far from it.

Needless to say, the briefer with the widely varying (and not surprising lower TRL) result found himself getting a lot of extra “help” he didn’t ask for. I’m sure if we had run the same process again on a different day of the week with a different set of reviewers, the results would have been entirely different.

I don’t blame the reviewers: I blame a process that had become too bureaucratic and complicated (and for that matter slow and expensive) to get a repeatable and reliable result. If this was being done for private dollars rather than to satisfy a bureaucratic wicket tied to a payment milestone, this never would have happened. The systems would have been built and integrated as quickly as possible and proof of technical maturity would have been based on the most rigorous real world test event possible to get to as fast as possible.

My experience was the rule rather than the exception when it comes to TRBs: Cost Plus program managers love these long drawn out tech maturation plans because they are filled with lots of events and meetings that are easily to estimate and get paid for. Engineers hate them because they create bureaucratic gates that slow down the work and their ultimate goal of delivering a product as fast as possible.

How all these steps no longer make sense

There are several reasons why the TRL scale no longer make sense. Building hardware today, thanks to technical innovations like reprogrammable ICs (FPGAs, GPUs), 3D printers, rapid simulation tools and CAD/CAM techniques, has never been easier. It’s about as hard to build hardware today as it was to write software when I started my career 20 years ago. Software is even easier: nowadays there are so many libraries, open source tools and APIs, not to mention AI copilots that are just starting to see widespread adoption, that your average software engineer is 10x more productive than they were then. So integration and maturation steps that before were painful and filled with risk are easily bypassed in favor of getting to a testable or flyable prototype.

It’s about as hard to build hardware today as it was to develop software when I started my career 20 years ago. Software is even easier: nowadays your average software engineer 10x more productive than they were 20 years ago.

The way that we design complex systems has also changed: the days of over-characterization and spec’ing systems to the particle level using the perfectly prescribed “Systems Engineering V” or waterfall development shown in Figure 2 has been replaced by Agile software and hardware engineering processes with rapid prototyping and iteration in mind. Failure is now accepted and embraced as part of the process!

“Mission Assurance”, the mantra I heard constantly during the first 5 years of my career has given way to “Elon’s algorithm”:

Ironically, we got rid of more quality processes and the rockets got more reliable!

All this being said, we almost certainly still need some simple lightweight metrics for abstracting the technical maturity and manufacturing maturity of systems.

Software Acquisition Framework - slayer of Software TRL?

The absurdity of the TRLs as they exist today is perhaps most obvious in software. Looking at Table 1 above from the perspective of a modern software engineer, 1-3 are basically one step (who writes algorithm description documents anymore?), 4-5 are basically one step, 6 is basically the alpha, 7 the beta, 8 is pilot and 9 is full release. I know for a fact however that there are R&D groups at various primes still operating within this framework — and getting paid cost plus dollars to do so.

The “systems engineering V” that is the northern star for the TRL rubric presumes a linear process of development for software, culminating in a Formal Qualification Test (FQT) in compliance MIL-STD-498. MIL-STD-498 (first published in 1994) was a pretty rigorous spec meant to ensure that the Operational Flight Program (OFP) or software stack for a system was safe to put on safety critical hardware. A two years gapfiller intended to holdover until commercial standards caught up is still in use in use today. It was written in an era of “spaghetti code” — Object oriented programming was still relatively new, MIPs of processing and Megabytes of memory were scarce resources and writing too many lines of code before hitting the compile button was something you did at your own peril. Today’s commercial software is highly containerized, heavily leveraging APIs and higher order languages with more automatic checking features (and now AI agents to write the code for you), is in many ways nothing like this, but yet we still build many of our largest aerospace systems to comply with these standards.

MIL-STD-498 mandates a rigid "big-bang" testing approach, where any software change triggers full-scale requalification due to strict document control, traceability, and waterfall-based processes. As Table 2 shows, is that it basically required an FQT every time you made even minor changes to the OFP. This makes even minor updates expensive and has condemned many DoD systems to software feature updates on a biennial basis (or worse). In an era where the Ukrainian drones are using commercial Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) processes to push software updates to drone fleets six or more times a day, this is entirely unacceptable.

In 2020, the DoD introduced the Software Acquisition Framework (SAF) shown in Figure 4 which greatly simplified the process of building software - embracing commercial agile development. One major change is acceptance of the reality that software is now an asset that must be continuously cared for and fed rather than something that you write once and only infrequently change afterwards.

Initially limited to just application software, the SAF has now been expanded to include embedded software as well. It was recently revealed that under SecDef Hesgeth, DoD intends to go even further and effectively mandate the Software Acquisition Pathway (SWP) for all software moving forward. Part of this is not just about speeding this up, but the mandate is to make greater use of commercial solution openings and Other Transactions (OT/OTAs) as the default rather than the exceptions. This puts the onus back on industry to deliver a product as requested (design/build) rather than the traditional time consuming process with massive oversight (design/bid/build).

So with the waterfall approach on it’s way out, it’s unclear to me if the software TRLs that went along with it have much of any utility anymore, except for marketing like the UBAs I started this article with.

What do we replace TRLs with?

So the question is what do we replace all this with?

I have wracked my brain for a little while now on what an appropriate replacement is, in particular from observing our team at CX2 and how they operate and mature our products. I’ve come to the realization that hardware, software and the system really don’t have a real 1:1 mapping anymore. The ease with which you can set up simulations due to commercial tools and rapidly build up hardware in the loop tests these days for most systems really changes the game.

I also think we need to recognize that 40+ years of building start ups has given us a really good nomenclature in the form of “pilot implementations” that we should embrace as defense nomenclature as well. Given that a pilot system in customer evaluation is almost a gold standard for Series A funding for all but the most deep tech of systems, it seems reasonable to me that we should embrace this for the TRLs as well.

Tying this back to the two examples I started this diatribe with, both of them would clearly fall under “Pilot implementation” by this definition with very little ambiguity — limited use by a customer in a real world context.

Wrapping up

To quote Bob Dylan, the times they are a changin’. The ease with which rapid prototyping and fielding can take place, perhaps best exemplified by the rapid pace of UAS and CUAS development by both sides in the Ukraine war, has made us question almost sacred processes for building systems. They have probably been obsolete for a while and we didn’t even notice because we saw no burning need to change. The TRL scale is just one example of something we need to get away from as we move to a more commercial contractor, fixed price, rapid model of procurement where time of fielding is a critical metric and not an independent variable.

I’ve taken my stab at a refresh of the TRL scale that I think makes more sense for 2025. Hopefully someone with more expertise (and more time on their hands) will try to iterate and improve upon it so that we have something much more useful and can quit trying to call everything TRL 9 when it isn’t.

However, the nascent counter-drone space has yet to fully embrace the targeting of the controller itself as it’s own CONOPs. Most C-UAS systems on the market today (as I detail below) are focused on shooting down or neutralizing the drone rather than it’s controller - defending against the arrow rather than disabling the archer.

As autonomous systems scale from 1v1 FPV drone engagements to full on autonomous drone swarms being commanded by a single or handful of users, it is essential we develop systems that can trace them to their point of origin and disable or destroy their controllers rather than attacking their link to the drones or the drones themselves. This is a crucial element of what I have referred to in a previous post as SEEN/DEEN - suppression and destruction of enemy emitters and networks.

In this ‘stack I will outline the gap in the solution space, show examples of how this has played out in other domains, give some of the reasons why this is hard and talk about prospective solutions so that we can take out the archer rather than the arrow.

Our National Counter-UAS strategy is basically defensive counter-air, but for drones

The Global C-UAS buyers guide contains 350 different types of C-UAS systems on the market as of April 2023. This is an insane proliferation of systems for a threat that is less than 15 years old. In Figure 1 below, I’ve binned these systems by their type more broadly to give you an idea of where the action is.

What’s particularly shocking is that for as much investment as Russia, China and Ukraine have invested in UAS technology, there are relatively few CUAS systems (at least ones uncoverable in this research survey). As Figure 2 below shows Russia has 18 systems, China has six and Ukraine has all of three.

It’s likely that some of the underreporting is due to this being an older survey or due to language barrier issues with researching various systems (e.g. Bow of Theseus favorite and Ukrainian friend Unwave was not included in this survey), so let’s treat this more as directionally than precisely accurate. One thing that is clear is that there is a massive proliferation of systems in the US for C-UAS, probably being driven by the rich VC funding and SBIR ecosystems where seemingly every Tam, Dick or Yurii was able to get VC backing or a grant to try something out in the last ten years or so.

Zooming in on the detector space, I read through (ok ChatGPT and I read through) all of them and 90%+ of the solutions are focused on finding and tracking the drone rather than finding the controller, i.e. stopping the arrow not the archer. This is driven by modalities: only SIGINT or Passive RF sensing systems are able to find the drone controller (Radar, Lidar and EO aren’t going to) in any geometry whatsoever since the others are purely meant to find moving targets.

Among passive RF detection systems a few such as AeroDefense, Validrone and Hidden Level do claim to have functionality to detect the drone controller. However, they also openly admit that they are geometrically limited in their ability to do this (i.e. limited by line of sight) and since all of these systems are ground based, this greatly limits their utility.

Line of Sight Challenges

One thing most of us have an intuitive understanding of is just how ineffective we are at spotting things at a distance from ground level. Despite what flat earthers may think, the curvature of the earth ensures that the horizon is barely 3 miles from you with your own eyes. This gets even worse when we couple it with obstacles like terrain, building, trees and other urban detritus which depending on frequency can either attenuate or block transmission entirely.

All but the lowest frequency RF transmissions follow the same line of sight rules as your eyes, so while a drone at a low altitude can be detected a ways off (8-10 miles), a controller’s range of detection is significantly less than that for a ground based transmitter. With kamikaze drones, ISR drones and other systems purporting ranges of 10 miles or more, the controllers are extremely likely to be beyond line of sight for tyour ground based systems to detect them.

Geolocation challenges

Further compounding the issue of fixing on a controller is that a single fixed RF passive sensor cannot geolocate an emitter on it’s own since it has no ranging capability. It must use either multi-lateration or TDOA techniques in conjunction with multiple sensors that also have line of sight to a ground based controller (see Figure 4). A single emitter can only produce a line of bearing. So to geolocate an emitter, you need multiple assets spread out to do the job and hopefully all of them are within line of sight of the signal of interest

The Obvious Solution: searching for controllers from a drone

Putting an RF detector on a drone solves both the range problem and single ship geolocation problems simultaneously. From even as low of an altitude as 100 feet, the drone would have line of sight of 12 miles or more, well within the range of most controllers. If the controller is expected to be at an even greater range, the drone can also increase it’s altitude until the controller is visible as well or to see over potential obstructions.

In the course of running a search pattern the motion of the drone also allows incredibly accurate geolocation using the same triangulation process, merely along a flight path rather than with multiple sensors. This can be done with relatively low direction finding accuracy thanks to high spatial separation and lots of measurements integrated over time. Figure 5 illustrates how this works.

A drone (or more generally an airborne platform) is the ideal platform for this mission because of the ability to dynamically search for the archer, rather than shooting down the arrow, thereby taking the fight to the enemy. In this respect, it fits in well with how heritage doctrine for fighting air wars applies in the lower altitude, lower speed drone fight in today’s air littorals.

Tying this together with the concept of offensive counterair operations

Offensive and defense counterair historically are a major focus area for the air force. Indeed, much of the electronic warfare enterprise - such as Anti-Radiation Missiles and Stand Off Jamming - is built to conduct several of the sub missions underneath the Offensive Counterair framework shown in Table 2.

The Suppression of Enemy Air Defense and Attack Operations missions have parallels in the Air Littorals domain where today’s “Drone Wars” are taking place. Specifically, it’s attacking a family of communications and EW systems, C2 centers and logistics targets: drone controllers, FPV operators themselves and drone storage & launch facilities (Attack Operations); enemy C-UAS jammers, UAS detection systems such as radars, counter-PNT systems like GPS jammers (SEAD/DEAD). I broadly categorize the latter under the umbrella of Suppression and Destruction of Enemy Emitters and Networks (SEEN/DEEN). There is some overlap with attack operations as drone controllers are essentially C2 nodes, hence why SEEN/DEEN is a more appropriate label for this concept of operations.

Increased complexity in the spectral environment

As counter UAS systems have advanced, so have their counter-counter measures. In particular the datalinks themselves have adopted a number of very hard to counter techniques - known as anti-jam (AJ) technology to counter the increasing number of jammers and detectors out to target these radios.

These techniques aren’t novel: electronically scanned beams and adaptive beamforming; frequency hopping spread spectrum waveforms; power control; interference cancellation algorithms and reserved frequency bands have been known and deployed in many radio systems since at least the 1970s. What is novel now is that these techniques are readily available at commercial price points and scales (down to low thousands or even hundreds of dollars per shipset) due to the ubiquity of modern software defined radios. These technologies are table stakes in the Degraded, Denied, Intermittent and Low Bandwidth (DDIL) environments we are seeing for autonomous systems on the modern battlefield.

I’m going to briefly touch on a few of the more novel solutions not mentioned in the list above.

A word about tethered drones

One anti-jam solution that’s been getting a lot of attention lately is tethered drones. It’s simply impossible to jam a wired signal, so in some ways this is the ultimate anti-jam solution. Tethering involves taking a massive spool of fiber optic cable and unwinding it behind the drone to maintain datalink. Many drones also include the ability to wind the tether back up as it gets closer to the controller.

The Russians have started using this in regions where jamming signals are too dense and impractical to overcome to target high value or high priority targets as shown in the video below.

This solution isn’t a new one: the US Army first fielded the TOW (Tube-launched, Optically tracked, wire-guided) missile in 1968 during Vietnam. It also comes with some real costs and headaches: in addition to the serious weight hit, it limits maneuverability as the drone is now dragging a tether that can snag on obstacles or be inadvertently cut by other airborne targets or explosions, rendering the drone useless. It’s really best utilized in straight shot scenarios on relatively open terrain. However, given the relative simplicity of this approach, it’s likely to continue showing up on battlefields in the future in some capacity or another.

Relay drones

As the battlefield has grown more complex in Ukraine, with counter-UAS jammers degrading data links becoming ubiquitous, and weapon engagement zones (WEZ) for drones frequently exceeding 10-25 km or more from their controllers - more elaborate schema have emerged for ensuring a communications link.

Relay drones have become one popular option for this. This is not a new concept: systems like the Battlefield Airborne Communication Node (BACN) has been in operation for quite some time for more conventional communications. What is new is their low-cost and consumer scale implementation as part of drone warfare, including satcom integration.

Perhaps the most famous of these is the Ukrainian Vampire drone built by Skyfall, also known to the Russians and the world as the Baba Yaga (after a witch that ate children from Slavic folklore). Thousands of these have deployed on the battlefield and with 15 kg of payload capacity they are used for everything from laying down anti-tank mines to acting as light bombers.

The Vampire can also act as a relay to its controller for smaller drones it launches like precision guided missiles via an on-board Starlink terminal. The Starlink terminal is much more difficult to detect and jam than a typical radio link due to it’s higher directivity (beam “pointiness”), more robust waveform control and multiple satellites to connect a link through.

Another advantage beyond greater range is that by moving the direct radio link to the kamikaze drone closer to the target, it increases link margin and becomes more robust against enemy jamming, improving terminal guidance in FPV mode. For instance, if the link distance is cut from 3 km down to 300 m, all things being equal, it takes 100 times the effective radiated power (ERP) to jam the same link. This is a massive advantage on a battlefield where jamming output power is generally limited by the lug ability of the batteries that power the jammer.

By switching the long distance link to Starlink rather than a radio link, the controller becomes somewhat harder to detect for the reasons above. However, detecting it isn’t impossible either. The Russians recently rolled out a “Starlink killer” of their own called the Kalinka system that is able to track Starlink signals and presumably direct fires on them. Many users have started running long cables to the terminals to offset from the drone pilot, since losing an offset antenna is vastly preferable to losing a human controller.

Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Many modern radio datalink manufacturers such as Persistent Systems, Doodle Labs and Silvus Technologies include the ability to create mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) of multiple drones or base station controllers. Depending on available topologies and software, these can be single string daisy chains enabling range extension or robust multi-node networks like those shown in Figure 6. The multi-node networks allow such novel capabilities as being able to route signals around nodes that find themselves in regions of high jamming, ensuring long distance signals find their way to their desired final source.

These networks are much harder to map and characterize then simple 1v1 systems, especially as the number of nodes increases. The Silvus SL5200 radio claims scalability to as many as 550 nodes, making mapping the network - somewhat necessary to find the controller - exponentially more difficult than the 1v1 scenario we introduced above.

It’s not clear if anyone has a solution for mapping MANET networks effectively at the physical signal level yet. Perhaps at the cyber level some clues could be uncovered by reading packet headers or similar techniques at the datalink layer of the OSI stack. Some work clearly needs to be done here to have a chance at uncovering controllers in the 1 v many scenarios we are likely to face as the Chinese prepare to field massive drone swarms.

Again, these mobile ad hoc network concepts are nothing new under the sun: Cooperative Engagement Capability, the exquisite version of MANET became a program of record for the US Navy in 1992. What has changed is the cost and consumer availability of these systems. By tying them to thousands of hard to detect and engage nodes, the scale of the program has become vastly more difficult.

Bringing it all together

It’s all too obvious that shooting the archer is better than shooting the arrow. In the drone wars of the 21st century, this is a much more effective way of neutralizing a threat since many hundreds of drones can be targeted by a single source.

For the 1v1 scenarios currently the baseline for FPV kamikaze drones and similar first generation UAS threats, moving our SIGINT capabilities to drones that can pull a “drag net” over the battlefield to fingerprint and fix on any drone controllers of interest, on which fires can then be directed, makes a lot of sense (nota bene: this is part of our current development focus at CX2).

As complex MANET network communications and relays become pervasive, it will become increasingly necessary to use multiple drones to more precisely and rapidly observe and fingerprint the network signals behavior. This means moving beyond SIGINT into what up until now were niche disciplines such as Foreign Instrument Signals Intelligence (FISINT) and Measures and Signals Intelligence (MASINT) and bringing them to the tactical edge.

In conclusion, the ubiquity of complex communication technologies at consumer scale mean that we must develop Find-Fix-Finish capabilities on steroids to counter them.

I started this blog in the summer of 2023 as a creative outlet after handing off the reins of Spartan. After six years of near continuous building since we started Epirus in 2018 and Spartan in 2020, I needed a break and a chance to observe and orient before deciding and acting on my next move.

Since then it’s turned into a semi-weekly passion project and a megaphone for me to continue making some of the key thesis points of the last ten years of my career. These include: the intersection of electronic warfare and networks; how the defense industrial base must embrace commercial best practices and abandon cold war era practices and mindsets to stay relevant; the rapid transition from C2 autonomy to mission based autonomy; and the burning platform need for mid-tier acquisition reform to keep our force rapidly reiterating.

Throughout my “sabbatical year” I had the opportunity to attend and present at numerous conferences; speak with countless founders, builders and investors; make a few angel investments; and advise some early stage start ups and venture capital firms. In that time, it became increasingly clear that we live in an era of accelerated change. Technology was following the same mega-trend of decentralization, best explained in Martin Gurri’s “The Revolt of the Public” (in my opinion the most important book written so far in the 21st century). It was becoming increasingly clear that the traditional top down institutions we have built during the 20th century were being upended by the bottoms up, decentralized institutions and networks that have come to dominate the 21st.

The implications of this “unbundling” for warfare were playing out on our screens daily with the invisible battlefield of the electromagnetic spectrum becoming a dominant domain of warfare, both in Ukraine as well as the war in the middle east since October 7th 2023. The democratization of low cost autonomous systems and software defined radios has brought IoT to the battlefield.

I connected earlier this year with Porter Smith, a veteran helicopter pilot and (at the time) A16Z partner who spent a great deal of time in Ukraine and saw the same trend playing out. After connecting with Mark Trefgarne, another successful entrepreneur in the tech space who founded and exited LiveRail to Meta and Lee Thompson, a SpaceX RF engineer who led the team that built the whole comms stack for Starship, we co-founded CX2 via the 8VC build program in order to build a 21st century Electronic Warfare prime.

Shortly after signing the term sheet with 8VC and A16Z in late spring, we were on a train to Ukraine to see for ourselves what was happening there. We saw first hand the changing character of war and those lessons learned and the relationships we made there have been folded into the work we are doing at CX2.

Other milestones this year

I had a couple of exits at the beginning and end of this year which have been great bookends for 2024.

I was an early advisor to Opengov, which was a spinout of a passion project called California Common Sense that Joe Lonsdale and I started over a decade ago. I introduced Opengov to a dozen or so cities in LA and OC that became some of the first customers for the transparency portal. Opengov had a massive exit of $1.8B to Cox Enterprises back in February. Congrats to Zac Bookman, Joe and the team there!

Spartan Radar, my second company, had a rebuilding year with the automotive market and the sensor market in particular overall undergoing a reset. The company transitioned CEO’s in May and my co-founder Blake Gasca took over as CEO. I’m happy to report that the company had a partial exit last week, with its Software division being acquired by a Fortune 100 Manufacturing OEM for an undisclosed sum. I will share more details about this as I can, but its great to know that the software product and team we built will live on in the stack of a future autonomy product. Congrats to the Spartan team on this huge milestone!

Articles I’ve Co-written with others this year:

Porter Smith and I were fortunate enough to have our OpEd published in the Wall Street Journal: The Future of Warfare is Electronic back in September, which launched CX2 out of stealth.

Dr. Fred Kennedy and I’s recently co-wrote: Dude, Where’s My M-Code? about the need for a rethinking of the USSF’s core mission and acquisition strategy.

The Former Fed published a piece I jointly wrote with Christina Ramstein, Head of People for CX2 on what makes x-government applicants stand out in the hiring process.

ICYMI Here, top 5 posts (by readership) from the past year:

1. The US Government is Finally Hitting CTRL+ALT+DEL on its Space Acquisition Strategy

2. What is Hard Tech?

3. Why can't we shoot down drones?

4. It's The Network Stupid!

5. SEEN and UNSEEN

Epirus news

My long time friend and collaborator Joe Lonsdale, was on the Shawn Ryan Show recently talking about Epirus and it’s implications for the future of warfare (you can watch the clip below). High Power Microwave and Directed Energy Weapons more broadly are an enabling capability for the future of warfare and an essential equalizer to the attritable mass brought about by the proliferation of cheap, expendable autonomous systems on the modern battlefield.

…And thanks for the plug Joe!

New from other start ups I’m an Advisor or Investor in

(Investor) Procurement Sciences, a company using AGI to automate and streamline the government proposal process, raised a $10M Series A led by Battery Ventures.

(Investor) Epsilon3, which up until now has focused on test procedure management, unveiled three new products to expand it’s footprint across the ERP space for development and manufacturing. These include enhanced timeline tools, MRP and a data storage portal.

(Investor) Wyvern Space a hyperspectral imaging company, raised a $6M round led by Squadra ventures.

(Investor + Advisor) Hexium, an Austin based start up focused on nuclear isotope concentration, raised an $8M seed round last March with participation from Mac.vc and R7 partners.

(Investor) Standard Metrics recently introduced a Global Benchmarking product which provides unparalleled insight by category into how the 2000+ start ups across their portfolio and how they are making and spending money.

(Advisor) Senra Systems which is revolutionizing the way wire harnesses and cables are manufactured, has attracted such Marquis investors as Sequoia, Founders Fund and a16z. The two co-founders, Jordan Black and Ben Shanahan were recently named to the Forbes 30u30 list for Manufacturing.

(Advisor) Safire systems, a pioneer in employing nano-technology to improve battery safety, recently closed an $8M round led by Canaan Partners.

(Advisor) Pterodynamics, the developer of the unique Transwing design for eVTOLs that is superior to tiltrotor methods such as those used by the V-22 Osprey, began real world testing from the deck of the USS Curtis Wilbur Destroyer during this year’s RIMPAC exercises.

(Advisor) Viridian Space got some great coverage for their air-breathing propulsion technology for VLEO from SpaceNews as they entered into the Seraphim space accelerator.

Podcasts and media coverage

1. The Evolving Role of EW in Conflicts Overseas - From the Crows’ Nest EW Podcast

2. Episode #397: Tech at the Front Lines: How Consumer-Scale Innovation is Shaping War Stuart Alsop’s Crazy Wisdom Podcast

3. Meet the Startup Revolutionizing Safety With Road Tech Tech Optimist Podcast with Mike Collins from Alumni Ventures Group

Best Memes

A year in memes with some of my favorites:

Merry Christmas/Happy Chanukah/May your Festivus Airing of Grievances be Cathartic

Unfortunately not coming to a Target near you (not for resale)- but super cool nonetheless! 10 year old Nathan thinks his life is now complete.

Can’t Just Keep On Keepin’ On

It’s been a little more than five years since President Trump gave the go order to stand up our sixth military service, the United States Space Force. Exuberance (perhaps irrational) followed; space operators and everyone else involved in the enterprise of putting things on orbit couldn’t help but smile. They were finally getting the recognition they deserved. Space would be put on par with other warfighting domains (land, sea, air) and the long-standing red-headed stepchild treatment – raided budgets, perceived disparities in promotions, pilots running satellite development programs – would come to an end.

And yet, half a decade in, we’re somehow no closer to realizing the dream of a true warfighting space force, one that brings the fight to bad guys on orbit. Instead, we’ve bogged down in squabbles over independent legal arms, public affairs branches, and legislative liaisons. Folks are spending countless hours worrying about songs, academies, uniforms, and naming conventions (did you like “Guardian” or would you have preferred “Sentinel?”). Despite being granted substantial budget authority ($30B in 2024 and a hair less in ‘25), calls for more money abound, often with little justification in terms of real program content. That might be forgivable, until you remember:

1) It took us almost twenty years to upgrade our missile warning assets following Operation Desert Shield and Storm, while contending with out-of-control cost overruns and perpetual delays;

2) We’ve waited almost two decades for a needed upgrade to our global positioning system, one which offers military users higher fidelity navigation data on a privileged channel known as M-Code – and we’re still waiting (did I mention out-of-control cost overruns and perpetual delays?); Even worse, in that time many legacy defense contractors have pointed to M-code as the reason to not invest in GPS-denied navigation solutions despite a palpable need being demonstrated every day on the battlefield in Ukraine.

3) In 2018, Defense Department leadership recognized that we had a unique opportunity to capitalize on a burgeoning commercial push to build and launch small satellites - and directed one of us to stand up a Space Development Agency to clear the decks of the old guard, demonstrate our determination to build lots of “Liberty Ships” and not one or two Battlestar Galacticas, and attract private sector innovators into the fold (think Starlink) in the bargain – but the SDA has since been a bit “borg’d,” crammed into the Space Force’s byzantine acquisition ecosystem, advised to not overcommit to commercial offerings (you can’t trust those crazy folks in the private sector); and

4) Elon Musk and his rebels at SpaceX came out of nowhere in the early 2000s to build reusable, inexpensive launch vehicles that now fly nearly every day – while the Space Force goes ahead and continues to pay Boeing and Lockheed Martin to keep their subsidized, overpriced boosters flying “just in case.” When they fly at all.

Perhaps all this apparent navel-gazing is forgivable; after all, we can’t simply set aside existing tools until we know new ones will work, can we? So - what new assets are we building and operating, with what new tactics and doctrine? How does the Space Force plan to address provocative Russian and Chinese moves on orbit? The possibility of treaty violations? Nuclear weapons? Where’s the modern-day equivalent of the P-51 Mustang, the B-17 Flying Fortress? We must be working on these, right?

Well, sadly, we appear to be keepin’ on keeping on. To quote a (very) senior Air Force officer from 2018, a quick line-for-line comparison of today’s budget and a historical one (from say, 1998) will look almost identical, save only the price tag. We’re still building and maintaining incredibly expensive missile warning satellites, global positioning satellites, communications satellites, and all the launch and ground infrastructure that goes into keeping our spacecraft flying. All 1960s and 1970s-era heritage, even if it’s been upgraded. And while this maintenance is essential –it’s egregiously insufficient.

A Space Force has to project force. In space. Otherwise it’s a glorified data collection service. But saying that out loud doesn’t come easy to a lot of the space establishment. They’ve been conditioned to speak in euphemisms. Even the mention of satellites as “big, fat juicy targets” by a celebrated space leader was enough to cause dismay and gnashing of teeth.

The W Word

So let’s be clear. Militarization of space happened a long time ago - right at the outset of the Space Age, in point of fact. Weaponization of space is inevitable, but our space community feels compelled to continue tiptoeing around this reality, in Hogwarts-like He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named style.

We can trace a lot of folks’ hesitancy back to the 1960s-era “Antarctica-zation” of space, codified in the Outer Space Treaty (1967). OST made space-based nuclear weapons and all sovereign claims to extraterrestrial territory (e.g., the Moon, asteroids) verboten. While reasonable people can (and do) debate the finer points of space property rights, the decision to keep nukes out of Low Earth Orbit was just common sense – such devices could circle silently overhead until needed, then re-enter Earth’s atmosphere in mere minutes, endangering pretty much every location on the planet. Placing all parties on constant hair-trigger alert is hardly conducive to the kind of stability you’d want to bring to the table when nuclear-capable countries are posturing or (worse) actively engaged in conventional warfare. In response to U.S. anti-ballistic missile initiatives, the Soviet Union briefly entertained this concept – the Fractional Orbital Bombardment System (FOBS) – in the late 1960s but ostensibly abandoned it a few years later. More recently, the Chinese have been suspected of considering something similar.

The "no nukes” provision of the Outer Space Treaty is often wrongly interpreted as “no weapons” (of any kind) – but that’s not how the treaty reads. There’s no provision prohibiting the deployment of conventional weapons to space. Several countries have already tested anti-satellite weapons (i.e., the U.S., Russia, China, and India) but to date, all these demonstrations have been ground-based, not space-based. China and Russia have fought for decades to push a “no space weapons” resolution through the United Nations, to no avail. There’s no consensus on this topic – and that gives the U.S. (and its Space Force) an opening to exploit.

As a nation, the U.S. has more to lose from on-orbit warfare than any other. We have more satellites, and rely on satellite-based data far more than any of our potential adversaries. As a result, our capabilities (on the ground or in space) make tempting targets. There’s not a lot of them, and they’re insanely expensive to build. To overcome the threat against these systems, the aforementioned Space Development Agency adopted a “proliferation” strategy, employing hundreds of cheap, small spacecraft that could be replenished and upgraded regularly. These “smallsats” could be degraded or destroyed in combat, but their sheer numbers would ensure that we could continue to operate through a conflict. The idea? Deterrence. You can’t shoot down enough, so why shoot at all?

Cosmos 2553 and the Russian Doomsday Satellite

It’s a solid strategy, and it appears to be making decent strides. But enemies get a vote. As we’ve discussed previously in these stacks, recently unclassified news reveals that in 2022, Russia decided to up the ante by placing Cosmos 2553 on orbit. Circling at 1,240 miles (~ 2,000 km) above the planet, Cosmos 2553 appears to be carrying a dummy nuclear warhead and some experimental gear intended as a pathfinder for something devastating. A nuclear weapon detonated at these altitudes would “energize” radiation belts just above Low Earth Orbit, damaging electronic components aboard all spacecraft in LEO, potentially wreaking havoc with many of the systems we’ve placed there. The jury is out on just how bad this might be, and whether subsequent launches could mitigate the impact of the outage.

Others are placing offensive capabilities on orbit, or threatening to do so. Why are we abiding by an unstated proscription, one never put on paper, to either slow-roll the development and deployment of our own offensive and defensive space capabilities, or to remain silent on the topic (forcing adversaries to guess)? Deterrence isn’t served by silence. We need to forcefully communicate our intent to safeguard space and ensure bad actors know the cost of their behaviors. Although no one is left alive to discuss it, the world experienced this same idealism regarding the air domain – briefly – before World War I shelved the “no shooters” approach in favor of pragmatism. Yes, pilots from opposing air forces waved at each other while they flew past, conducting reconnaissance missions for their respective nations… for awhile.

Pivoting to Access and Effects

So where to begin? Just a couple of weeks ago, W.J. Hennigan of the New York Times damningly described the Space Force’s mission as “…sit[ting] and watch[ing] what’s going across all of space day after day…” Really, that’s the mission? Imagine someone suggesting that the U.S. Navy’s job is to “sit and watch what happens on the open ocean.” We can no longer simply be monitors of the Earth from space and tenders of static spacecraft. Space is itself a potential zone of conflict, and it makes little sense to go on pretending otherwise. Threats can and undoubtedly will arise in this environment that hold at risk not just our space assets, but everything we hold dear on the ground, in the air, and at sea.

What matters now - and what the Space Force needs to shift its primary emphasis away from monitoring and upkeep to (full) awareness, (rapid) access, and (decisive) effects:

- The Space Force needs to know where everything is between Very Low Earth Orbit (VLEO) and the Moon, and track it all (accurately, continuously, and yes, inexpensively);

- As importantly, the Space Force must also be able to reach out and touch anything from VLEO to the Moon, whenever it has reason to do so - and to conduct such operations in a timely manner, so that adversaries recognize that their activities will be (1) immediately attributed to them; and (2) liable to significant consequences, up to and including destruction of their assets;

- “Reaching out and touching” is going to involve a combination of access (getting to any and every orbital regime in the Earth-Moon system quickly and efficiently) and effects (likely an assortment of near- and far-field capabilities, to include so-called ‘speed of light’ weapons such as lasers or particle beams);

- This suggests less “2001” and more “Star Wars” (or perhaps “The Expanse”): The Space Force needs to develop much more aggressive forms of maneuver, and do it now. Our current attempts at Rendezvous and Proximity Operations (RPO) today are ponderously slow - your target has a chance to move if it sees someone coming, and if someone is looking (say) in the infrared, it’s hard not to see somebody coming against a very cold space background. We have to develop and field propulsion with far more instantaneous maneuver capability than an adversary’s, so that our Space Force’s “P-51” can intercept faster than the enemy can react. In a word, that’s delta-V, and we need to have lots of it. Multiple kilometers per second of it, at will - not a miserly “maneuver without regret,” but a formidable “hell, yeah, we’re heading to our targets,” out to the Moon or LaGrange Points in a day or less, and back to refuel and re-fight as necessary. That tech’s available, and if we commit, we can be flying it in short order.

“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.” - Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Never forget: Space is big. While we might allude here to a culture of dogfighting or bombing runs, it’s important to recognize that cislunar space dwarfs all other warfighting domains and does so by a wide margin - almost 220,000 Earths can fit inside the volume between here and the Moon. Getting around this - even with advanced propulsion - is going to take hours to days, and everything is moving (predictably or otherwise). These facts constrain the sorts of tactics we can expect to develop and execute, and it’s why we’re going to have to bring energy- and power-dense systems to bear, since we’re not often going to have the luxury of being near our adversaries when bad things happen. But we’ll still have to be able to affect them at distances of thousands of kilometers or more. Coherent beam weapons - powerful ones - need to be at or near the top of our shopping list.

Wrapping Things Up: What to do about Cosmos 2533

Our continued devotion to twentieth-century style space acquisition and operations (one which we refuse to toss overboard despite all signs of creaky obsolescence) has bequeathed us a Maginot Line in space. We spend tens of billions of dollars on exquisite, monolithic systems that are late to deliver, over budget and obsolete before they even launch - assets that are rendered moot in the face of an enemy that is literally willing to knock out everything in orbit with an on-orbit nuclear EMP attack to “win.” The Space Force’s Space Development Agency was tasked to rapidly “proliferate” inexpensive, mass-reproducible assets, following the Starlink model - but hobbled by oldthink and sunk cost, can the SDA approach prevail? And is it going to be permitted to move fast enough to deal with threats such as Cosmos as they emerge?

Our continued devotion to twentieth-century style space acquisition and operations has bequeathed us a Maginot Line in space.

In the specific case of a nuclear-armed asset in LEO, how we confront such a threat comes down to: (a) being able to precisely track and assess what a particular enemy asset is doing in real time (awareness); (b) having our own assets available on orbit to “reach out and touch” such systems as required (to deter potential aggressors from building such capabilities in the first place, but also to act on demand - access and effects); (c) rapid reconstitution (again, think lots of cheap, disaggregated, ready-to-go Starlink-like vehicles + high-cadence launch operations) of our systems if the worst happens and we suffer attrition on orbit - once the radiation levels fall (re-establishing access); and d) deploying or maneuvering our at-risk assets out of the way of the contamination band (flexible access).

It is time for a new way: embracing space as a warfighting domain, fully embracing disaggregation and investing in systems and technologies that will allow us to bring the fight to adversaries on-orbit - rather than endlessly maintaining capabilities that are increasingly irrelevant and serve mainly to satisfy contractor constituencies. We cannot keep on keeping on any longer: change is needed yesterday.

TL;DR

The uber theme of the 21st century so far, summarized by Martin Gurri’s The Revolt of the Public, has been the disruption of traditional top down institutions by decentralized bottoms up networks with diffuse and dynamic control. The battlefields of the 21st century have been no different: the massive combined arms forces with centralized command & control of the last century gave way to diffuse networks of non-nation actors like Al-Qaeda, ISIS or even Anonymous.

Recently, even conflict between nation-states has taken on a flavor of this, with Russia and Ukraine utilizing asymmetric systems like remotely piloted (FPV) drones and GPS jammers to offset the massive capital advantage of expensive GPS guided artillery and heavy armor.

Despite first being fielded at scale in the late 90s in the form of Predator surveillance drones in the Bosnia war, autonomous drone technology is still nascent. The main catalyst for this tech has been the Cambrian explosion of commercial technology for the software and hardware components enabled by cheap (mostly Chinese) global supply chains.

In 2013, DJI introduced the Phantom which quickly became the dominant affordable consumer drone as FPV drones were introduced by ImmersionRC, Fat Shark and others around the same time. The combination of cheap consumer scale drones combined with FPV control has created a weapon of war which has come to define the largest war in Europe in 80 years. Suddenly the same precision strike capabilities that only great nation states could afford to build in small numbers due to expense were widely available to any hobbyist (or terrorist) with an Amazon account.

As the conflict has dragged on, the FPV systems have become more and more hands off and automated. The introduction of terminal guidance systems incorporating elements of visual AI algorithms by Auterion, FoxFour and others was driven by the need to simultaneously defeat jamming and improve precision, particularly against moving targets. The massive scale of design iteration by two software savvy adversaries has driven a pace of product evolution that is reaching the limits of what is possible using 1v1 tactics and operations. This brings us to the swarm and the next stage of autonomous warfare.

First a word on jamming

Disrupting/jamming the command datalink and video downlink is the most popular non-kinetic way to defeat drones - resulting in hundreds of CUAS jammers proliferating on the market today. These range from the elaborate (like this Titan system from BlueHalo/now Aerovironment) which employ sophisticated AI/ML algorithms to match narrow band jamming to particular frequencies, to simpler barrage noise jammers such as those made by Unwave in Ukraine (pictured on the right). In jamming systems, the more precisely you can match your jamming waveform to the one you are trying to defeat, the more effective it will be. Narrow band jamming tries to match this as precisely as possible, but must be tuned to the band of interest and follow the signal as it hops around; barrage noise jamming in contrast floods the whole operating frequency range of the signal of interest with noise, resulting in a lower jam to signal (J/S) ratio but ensuring that at least some degradation of performance is achieved.

While US jamming systems such as Titan can run tens to even hundreds of thousands each, the Barrage noise jammers on the right retail for low thousands of dollars. While in theory the system on the left should work better, in practice it’s sophisticated response systems designed to tune the energy so precisely and optimally are fragile when confronted with rapidly changing waveforms, tactics and other real world issues commonly seen on the battlefield in Ukraine. They also require more operator training to use, which isn’t always realistic for 60 day conscripts. So the Ukrainians have mostly stopped using these US in systems in favor of simpler domestic solutions - primarily barrage noise jammers that are cheap and expendable.

Cheap and unsophisticated electronics favoring simplicity and brute force over exquisite and performance optimization wins on the battlefield in Ukraine

Unwave presently builds up to 2,500 jammers per month, making them the largest EW company in the world based on pure unit volume.

The network enables more elaborate drone tactics and maneuver

Why is this important? A key distinguishing feature of kamikaze drones, unlike the last generation of missiles, is that they are not fire and forget. This is an asset in the sense that they are dynamically retargetable, can be waived off from a strike at the last minute and can even conceivably return if not exercised).

However, inherent in this is that the user must stay engaged and connected to the drone to precisely command it. This creates a liability as shown in this clip from Starship Troopers (perhaps the most famous line in all of Robert Heinlein’s books by the way):

Attention and engagement from the operator in a 1v1 sense is integral to drone warfare today in a way that it wasn’t on past battlefields, where soldiers and units separated from command & control could still continue to fight on, albeit without the benefit of collective effectiveness.

Architectural robustness and new tactics bas the fight rages continue to make drones on both sides more robust against jamming. In addition to traditional anti-jam improvements to comm links like frequency hopping, spread spectrum, better filters and antennas and other techniques to buy the data link more robustness, we are also seeing the introduction of more automation to relieve the burden on the datalink.

The first and easiest improvement was the introduction of waypoint modes whereby drones can fly on a pre-set route without the benefit of ground communication. However, GPS jamming frustrates waypoint modes and prevents them from being used. This was then countered with the introduction of terrain following navigation (TFN) which enabled the drone to find its way by looking at terrain, using techniques similar to what was done in pre-GPS cruise missiles like the Tomahawk.

Automated terminal guidance systems were recently added to enable the drone to hit its target on final approach without the need for a user command link. Since jamming signals grow in strength with the square of the distance to the target, these help ensure that the drone will fly to it’s target even if it’s target is employing CUAS jammers itself.

A new capability we’ve started to see in the last twelve months or so is the addition of relay drones, such as the Baba Yaga and the Dovbush Kamikaze drone carrier (shown in video below), which are able to serve as both a signal booster for the actual attack drones and also enabling the comm data link to have line of sight over the jamming. The higher angles of attack these achieve also make the kamikaze drones even harder to destroy.

US suppliers of radios are moving a step beyond this with the introduction of mesh or so called Mobile Ad Hoc Networks. Multiple drones or ground nodes operating cooperatively can bypass regions of jamming by connecting in directions and through nodes that are less impacted. Silvus Mobile Networks with their MN-MIMO technology is considered the Cadillac of this space, with Cadillac prices ($10-$15k per radio). Persistent Systems is another MaNET radio worth mentioning in the same vein, though the addition of ground towers to their architecture adds an unnecessary vulnerability even if extending range to 75 miles or more. Until the radios themselves start to cost less than the rest of the drone (many large Ukrainian attack drones cost $15k each, smaller ones as little as $1000), it’s not clear to me these approaches will see widespread employment, at least not in Ukraine.

“What’s flying today is almost all Ukrainian. Also, there are still a lot of Chinese drones,”

US drones have really not been well received in Ukraine since the first year of the war, with the natives preferring their own systems as more battle tested and easier to adapt. There is also a prevalent feeling that many American drone companies are just there to check a marketing box and aren’t really there to help them win the war.

How is swarming different

As I previously mentioned, up until this point, drone warfare has been primarily 1 on 1. This is a form of combat organization called melee (left of Figure 2 below) and is the default of uncoordinated forces. The tunnel visioned approach of FPV operators executing a narrow mission to seek and destroy individual vehicles lacks the coordination and synchronization to do much else.

However, recent reports from the Kursk offensive indicate that we may be seeing the beginnings of more complex organization and tactics occurring. During the offensive, it was reported to me that the Ukrainians took advantage of a lack of electronic warfare systems in the front on the Russian side (most had been deployed to Karkhiv, Donetsk or elsewhere) to put up a huge wall of kamikaze drones. These drones stayed in the air like loitering munitions and were used as a mass formation that was able to push forward and make room for advancing combined Ukrainian forces that were able to seize and hold territory (we’ve yet to build a drone that can replace infantry and armored vehicles for this). This proved enormously effective and was integral to them penetrating deep into Russian territory within the Kursk Oblast (state) as shown in Figure 3.

These operations, while enormously effective, represent only a fraction of the maneuver potential of drones, in particular as we uncouple their precise command and control from their human operators. With so many systems dependent on remote operation, the network will become the key to sustained operations: without a datalink the drone is mostly just an expensive paperweight right now.

Meanwhile, the product people are busy figuring out how to launch drones at scale, as you can see in this (rather frightening) video from China:

What is clear is that regardless of what level of autonomy is required, these drone swarms will require a great deal of in-situ cooperation. Nearly 20 years ago, Paul Arquilla and Don Ronfeldt at Rand wrote a visionary paper on “Swarming & The Future of Conflict” which really outlined the key characteristics of the drone swarms we will soon be seeing as the next evolution of battlefield maneuver.

“The historical insight that information flows (or their disruption) provide a key, both to understanding and practicing swarming, should encourage U.S. military leaders to view information operations as a central element in the development of future military doctrine” - Paul Arquilla, Don Ronfeldt from Swarming & The Future of Conflict

Arquilla and Ronfeldt saw the key enabler of swarms as information systems and specifically networks: “…the rise of advanced information operations will bring swarming to the fore, establishing a new pattern in conflict.” These insights were ahead of their time and we are just now seeing them play out.

The Denied, Degraded, Intermittent, Low Bandwidth (DDIL) environment

A lot of proposals from DIU and others have been coming out lately asking for drones that can operate in Degraded, Disconnected, Intermittent and Low-bandwidth (DDIL) environments. This is simply the latest acronym/buzzword that the DoD has come up with to talk about a comms denied and GPS denied environment, something they’ve been thinking about for quite a while. However, what is perhaps different this time is the implicit assumption that the systems will have to operate or fight through the electronic interference rather than simply having a better network, more jam resistant GPS or radio to just overcome it.

Victory in future battles will depend more on who has the best “networks” than on who has the strongest “platforms.” - Arquilla & Ronfeldt

The important insight to draw from this is that in a world of wireless networks, the spectrum characteristics of each space on the grid is essential to fingerprint, characterize and monitor. Based on conversations with front line forces I’ve had in Ukraine, very elaborate electronic topography is being mapped and lanes free of friendly datalink and PNT jamming (yes the Ukrainians also jam GPS) are maintained so that their own drones can pass into the no man’s land unimpeded. These may change dynamically based on mission planning, times of day or stages of an operation.

The need to “fingerprint” the battlefield and find, fix and eventually finish hundreds of emitters will be essential to creating lanes of communication to command and monitor swarms of autonomous systems.

In traditional electronic warfare, we spent a lot of time leading up to the conflict in Intelligence Preparation of the Battlefield (IPB) trying to discern the Electronic Order of Battle (EOB) the enemy would follow so we could defeat their air defense systems. In this modern electronic war underway in Ukraine, we are seeing this taken to a level of complexity orders of magnitude beyond layups of maybe 200 radars along the Fulda Gap in Germany (the canonical battlefield for the clash of the Superpowers) or the Taiwan strait. The need to “fingerprint” the battlefield and find, fix and eventually finish hundreds of emitters - in real time - will be essential to creating lanes of communication to autonomous systems.

Putting this all together

The complexity of the imminent introduction of the swarm will make this all the more essential and put pressure on the resolution and latency of the systems that do this. It’s almost impossible to imagine that large exquisite systems like Compass Call and Rivet Joint will get anywhere near the fight to be able to do this given the density and sophistication of modern air defenses I discussed in the previous post.

If we want to employ swarms rather than people at scale to defeat our adversaries, it will also be incumbent on us to develop new ways to fingerprint the battlefield and build a new “electronic wall” that can hold and secure spectrum and electronic topography in the same way we hold territory today. The Suppression and Destruction of Enemy Emitters and Networks (SEEN/DEEN) I mentioned in the previous article must become part of our doctrine if we are to succeed on the battlefield in the swarm era.

I’ll leave you with these final words of wisdom from Arquilla & Ronfeldt, who truly were decades ahead of their time: “Today, the key form of organization on the rise is the network, especially the all-channel network. The new information technologies render an ability to connect and coordinate the actions of widely distributed “nodes” in almost unprecedented ways. Whoever masters this form will accrue advantages of a substantial nature. Yet, networking alone is not enough; just organizing into a network is no guarantee of success. There must also be principles and practices—a doctrine—to guide what a networked force should do and how it should behave.”

It’s becoming increasingly clear that new tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) are emerging as UAS become the workhorses of modern combat. The introduction of the drone in the 21st century has become as impactful as the missile was in the last 50 years of the 20th. While today’s drones (like the one’s shown in Ukraine below) are primarily remotely piloted, it’s only a matter of time before they go partially or fully autonomous.

Going forward, drones will comprise not just the vanguard of combat forces but many of it’s other elements in sensing, logistics and strike. This makes the wireless spectrum - and the communications networks that leverage it- a more vital domain of combat than ever. While the kills above are almost entirely taking place with remotely piloted First Person View (FPV) drones, it doesn’t take much imagination to see drone combat growing to the intelligent swarm scale portrayed in science fiction:

In this piece I will talk about how we got here, the current challenges in electronic warfare and how our doctrine and EW systems are not equipped to solve them. I will introduce how we will solve it: by tactically shifting from an emphasis on suppression of enemy air defense (SEAD) to suppression of enemy emitters and networks (SEEN).

Networked drones and implications for EW

“Our culture tends to fill our heads with all kinds of false notions, making us believe things about what the world and human nature should be like, rather than what they are actually like.” - Robert Greene

It is an age old adage of warfare that “the enemy gets a vote”. Unfortunately the US defense industrial complex is often guilty of building sandcastles in the sky and trying to develop the solution for the war they want to fight rather than creating optionality and acquisition agility that allows them to adapt to the war they will fight.

There is few areas where this is more apparent then in the domain of electronic warfare. Here, in spite years of lobbying by the Association of Old Crows (AOC) and several former Electronic Warfare Officers (EWO) such as Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE) serving in congress, we are still largely leveraging an EW enterprise organized around cold war legacy platforms designed for intelligence preparation for the battlefield (IPB), self-protect of aerial and ship assets, and a mission set that hasn’t evolved much from the cold war. As Table 1 illustrates, despite a 15 year effort to recapitalize our electronic warfare assets, we are still very much wedded to exquisite systems, albeit on newer platforms.

It should be noted that this isn’t all the Pentagon’s fault: the peace dividend of the ‘90s ended a lot of programs and during the last two decades Congress has only passed an actual defense budget on time in only 5 of the last 20 years. This has left acquisition officials with little choice but to cobble together incremental improvements to existing systems rather than build new ones. That being said, the Pentagon is infamous for fetishizing swiss army knife systems that are exquisitely designed and the EW domain is no different.

“In the year 2054, the entire defense budget will purchase just one aircraft. This aircraft will have to be shared by the Air Force and Navy 3-1/2 days each per week except for leap year, when it will be made available to the Marines for the extra day.” - Augustine’s 16th law (Norm Augustine was the last CEO of Martin Marietta Aircraft)

Where new systems have been developed and deployed successfully, they are mostly as point solutions like countering Improvised Explosive Devices (IED) during the GWOT campaign or more recently for drone detection and defeat systems (C-UAS). One counter example of this was the ALQ-249 stand off jamming pod which was recently deployed on Navy Growler jets in the middle east, after nearly 15 years of development (I was a system engineer on this program early in my career). While it certainly represents a huge step up in capability, a pair of $15M pods mounted on a $70M aircraft is still an exquisite system that is only available in limited numbers and has range limited by the carriers it flies from.

Meanwhile, the battlespace, following our every day lives has become increasingly crowded with emitters - sensors and wireless systems, along with the robots they control, have become ubiquitous. The spectrum has become as vital to 21st century warfare as the shipping lanes were to the 20th.

“In modern warfare, electromagnetic warfare may be the main effort to achieve the desired strategic effects.” - Gen Charles Q. Brown, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

We are flying into a hornets nest

The US collectively spends over $5B a year on electronic warfare systems with that spending expected to go up at least 50% by the end of the decade. But as the previous section showed, these capabilities are limited mostly to self-protect systems on things like fighter jets or mostly locked up in platforms that are too expensive to really be usable in anything but a full scale conflict.

In a full scale conflict, as we are seeing daily in Ukraine and as Figure 2 shows, Chinese air defenses are going to push our flywheel systems out many hundreds of kilometers from where the fight is at and even the Growlers would have their hands full dealing with the inner rings of SAMs and their targeting and early warning radars.

Worse yet, studies show that it may take 40 or more weapons (delivered by $100M-$1B platforms) to penetrate this web of defensive systems to hit a single target - making our precision strike doctrine entirely too costly. This is the offensive corollary to what we have been seeing in the Iran-Israel conflict and Houthi cruise missile campaign in the Red Sea: where thousands of multi-million dollar missiles are necessary to protect against $30,000 drones and $150,000 ballistic missiles.

In the absence of definitive air superiority, it’s doubtful our exquisite systems would fair much better than the Russian A-50 Mainstay surveillance planes the Ukrainians have been making Mince meat out of in Ukraine to the tune of $350M a piece. Yet these are the same systems we would need to rely upon to understand defeat and target enemy communications systems that are responsible for managing the complex web of autonomous systems at play on the modern battlefield.

Our enemies are investing in drone technology heavily. The Russians are claiming they will build over a million drones this year. The Chinese build over 20,000 a day ( over seven million/year). Meanwhile US domestic production is stubbornly stuck at 20,000 annually (though increasing) and many of our suppliers are still dependent on Chinese supply chains for critical components like batteries, motors and motor controllers. Chinese sanctions recently kneecapped leading US drone supplier Skydio in fact by cutting off batteries in retaliation for selling to Taiwan.

Everywhere we look, asymmetric enemies pervade who will bleed our magazine of expensive precision missiles dry and beat us with cheap stuff that they can produce at rates two orders of magnitude faster than we can. The consequences of hollowing out our industrial base for decades in the name of “efficiency” while our military contractors focused on precise exquisite systems is laid bare. Worse yet, this is just the beginning, as we are still fortunate enough to be dealing with 1 v 1 systems and not yet autonomous swarms.

The scale of drone warfare changes the game

“Quantity has a quality all of it’s own”- Josef Stalin

With the kind of multi-layered defenses shown in Figure 2 in place, our doctrine of establishing air superiority to ensure freedom of maneuverability on the ground is called into question. As the Ukraine war has shown in volumes, we must develop the ability to fight up close and in the low altitude environment known as the air littorals (shown in Figure 3), in spite of lack of air superiority. This is the space dominated by drones and autonomous systems which we expect to be deployed by us and against us at scale. Just to cite one statistic from the NATO conference I attended in Krakow in June: 30% of the vehicle kills achieved by the Ukrainians conflict were due to kamikaze drones. Some may attribute this to the fact that neither side has achieved air superiority, but it’s hard to imagine looking at Figure 2 that air superiority is something we should expect at the onset of any future conflict.

The density of drones in the air littorals that we’ve seen in Ukraine has reached a dizzying level: as many as 800 per square mile. Add to this the ubiquity of cell phones, IoT, Push To Talk radios, radars, jammers and other emitters in the space and you have a signal environment that is impossible to sort out from the 200km+ range away that our SIGINT systems will find themselves at.

The shear emitter density of the modern battlefield will drive SIGINT systems to the tactical edge - it’s just geometry.

Just as a thought exercise, consider a DF system with pristine resolution of .5 degrees at low frequencies (800 MHz, 600 MHz or 2.4 GHz) where a drone and drone controllers datalinks emit. At 200 km range, you could have as many as 8000 drones in each angle bin under peak conditions - impossible to sort out and separate from stand off distances. You need sensors up close in large enough numbers to find, fix and finish these systems before they overwhelm and finish you.

Move over Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses (SEAD)

What was in the past a “suppression of enemy air defenses” or SEAD problem, with sensing, electronic attack and HARM missile attacks principally focused on a few radars and air defense network comm systems to clear the route for the strike package, has turned into a suppression of enemy emitters and networks problem as we now face a quagmire of networked comms, drones, cell phones, radios and jammers on the modern battle field.

The economics of taking out a $100M SAM missile battery like a SA-300 system are completely different than taking out a $15,000 GPS jammer or a $1,500 drone controller. Using a $1.3M AARGM-ER missile to take out a $100M missile battery is a great trade. A $15,000 jammer? Not so much.

How we change the game

The solution to this is that the drones and weapons systems on the tactical edge must themselves become the SIGINT systems. Moving sensors to cheaper drone platforms that are more expendable enables them to get closer to the enemy without fear of putting a soldier’s life at risk. At close ranges, precise geolocation and passive tracking of moving targets becomes more feasible with cheaper systems- signals separate better geometrically at closer ranges, making them easier to fix and track.

Closer range also means less sensitivity is required to detect the signals and a lower overall density of emitters is within line of sight. Cheaper, more expendable systems can be employed here as opposed to highly sensitive ones. More emphasis must be placed on communication intelligence (COMINT) rather than radar intercept (known as ELINT) and analysis at or near the tactical edge. These are systems that we currently don’t field in large quantities but lessons learned from Ukraine are making them even more vital.

“COMINT has very much moved from that preserve of the few into something hugely necessary for the masses…I think what we’re seeing now, is how do western forces break out of the mindset of the few and actually have a capability that has mass?…There’s a lot of western solutions that became too exquisite, too high value, too low quantity. Whereas now we’ve seen something…driven by the fact that you’ve got 1000s of assets up and down the front” - Graeme Forsyth, SPX Communication Technologies (from Journal of Electromagnetic Dominance)

So perhaps it’s time for new terminology and a new mission focus? We are no longer talking purely about suppression and destruction of enemy air defenses (SEAD/DEAD) as a mission; we are talking about suppression and destruction of enemy emitters and networks (SEEN/DEEN).

The SEEN/DEEN mission will require new systems that are cheaper, more ubiquitous and more expendable. We have the capacity to build them (and not to talk my own book) but it is a key focus for us at CX2.

In a future post, I will get into the military organization of drone armies and how we are starting to see the emergence of large scale tactics and strategy, moving beyond mere 1v1 drone vs target melees, but for now I close with emphasizing that a new mission set brings with it the need for an entirely new set of systems built around it.

We are slowly getting the message…slowly.

Some members of our military industrial complex would prefer to bury their heads in the sand and continue to build more F-35s, NGAD and other systems. These air superiority systems will do us little good if the enemyis able to flood the zone with thousands of autonomous systems who pin down our ground forces with strikes and soak up our expensive precision guided munitions that have allowed us to win the last major force operations and which we are currently reliant upon to take out these systems with. Hopefully efforts like Replicator and efforts by defense innovators to change the way we fight will win out here. We can’t continue to fight the war we want to fight, we have to prepare for the war we will fight.