The Future of Autonomous Electronic Warfare in Multi-Domain Operations | The Pair Program Ep77

Speaker A: Welcome to the PEAR program from Hatchpad, the podcast that gives you a front row seat to candid conversations with tech leaders from the startup world. I'm your host Tim Winkler, the creator of Hatchpad.

Speaker B: And I'm your other host, Mike Gruen.

Speaker A: Join us each episode as we bring together two guests to dissect topics at the intersection of technology, startups and career growth. Welcome back to the Pair program. I'm your host Tim Winkler, joined, uh, by my co host, Mike Gruen. Uh, Mike was doing a little bit of a, you know, prep for today's episode and stumbled into the wild world of electromagnetic spectrum facts. So I wanted to play a quick game of, uh, two Truths and a lie with you. Um, number one, the microwave oven was an accidental discovery while working on radar tech in World War II. Number two, dolphins can use bio sonar so sophisticated could rival modern submarine detection. And number three, there are research projects using lightning as a source of spectrum based communication and extreme weather scenarios. Which of those is the lie?

Speaker B: Yeah, I was going to go with the third one because the.

Speaker A: Yeah, you just got tipped off by an expert, so.

Speaker B: Well, no, because I've heard. I knew the first one and I knew the second one and then I was just trying to replay in my head if there were any details that you had included in the first two that might. But the third one sounded a little far fetched.

Speaker A: Yep, yep, you're right. You're right. Dead giveaway. Um, well, we're, we're uh, going to get a little bit deeper than that on this discussion. Let's, let's give our listeners just a quick preview of today's episode. So today's theme, we're going to be talking about the future of autonomous electronic warfare in multi domain operations. Uh, to kind of simplify this just a bit for our listeners who may not be well versed with some of this lingo, imagine, um, a world where battles aren't just fought with infantry, tanks and fighter jets, but with invisible waves of energy. Um, that's uh, the world that we are living in as we've witnessed with the wars in Ukraine and in Israel. Um, war technology that's changing from a more physical battlefield to an electromagnetic one with drones, sensors, um, electro electromagnetic spectrum across maritime, land, air, space and cyber operations. So we're going to be diving into how the US is reshaping electronic warfare through autonomy, distributed systems and uh, smart use of the electromagnetic spectrum. Uh, and to break it down, we've got two experts, uh, on the subject that are joining us. Nathan Mintz, uh, co founder of CX2, uh, military tech start startup that's building a slate of electronic warfare hardware and software platforms that are AI enabled. Um, prior to starting CX2, Nathan worked at Raytheon and Boeing and previously was the founding CEO of Epirus in 2018. Uh, and alongside Nathan we have Dr. William Dollar. Young, so goes by Dollar, leading expert in electronic warfare, uh, former Air Force electronic warfare commander, MIT trained PhD and current research professor and DARPA advisor, uh, known for advancing electronic warfare, AIML and spectrum warfare across defense, academia and venture backed innovation. Uh, both of these guests are going to bring a unique vantage point. One from the battlefield of innovation and the other from the policy and strategic side of electromagnetic dominance. So I'm um, pretty sure we got the right guys to break all this down for us. So Nathan and Dollar, thank you guys joining us on the Pair program.

Speaker C: Thanks m. Thanks for having us.

Speaker A: Awesome. All right, now before we dive into the, the discussion, we kick things off with a fun segment that we call Pair Me Up. Uh, we all go around the room, spitball, two things that just kind of go together. Mike, you lead us off. Uh, what do you got for us today?

Speaker B: So, yeah, so not uh, that long ago, I did some traveling for 4th of July up to Boston and my uh, my pairing is going to be traveling and getting local insider tips. So like I thought like, so we were gonna, we were up there for the fourth, we wanna see the fireworks, but we didn't like, we're not gonna get in line at like 2 in the morning or whatever to get a good seat or whatever, like whatever. So we wanted to get like the local, like what's a good vantage point? And uh, so we got a number of tips and a waiter at one of the restaurants gave us a great tip of like, go over to this park, you'll have a great view of it. You'll, you know, you'll have a good time and you'll avoid the crowds. And it was perfect. And it reminded me a lot of the first time I came down to D.C. visiting my brother and we watch the fireworks from the steps of the Pentagon. Stuff like that that you just like. It's, you know, everybody goes to the mall, they think, oh, uh, you know, if they're, especially if they're tourists. So getting those sort of insider tips from the locals.

Speaker A: Yeah, insider knowledge. I, I've always found Uber drivers are great for that. You can always get a uh, good scoop from an Uber driver. Server's another good one too. If you're at a restaurant get that local scoop. How was the sheriff?

Speaker B: Yeah, it was funny. The concierge was steering us towards this. I was like, that seems, that seems like a long way to go. And then we asked the waiter and he was like, you should just do this. I was like, that, that sounds great.

Speaker A: They know the deal. Good stuff. All right, I'll jump in. I'm gonna go with Amazon, uh, Prime Day and fomo. Uh, and every year, you know, Amazon Prime Day rolls around. It's actually more like Prime Week this point. It's like three days, uh, not one. Uh, but they're very, how they roll this out, great deals. And I always have this, this feeling of missing out on something. Some sort of great deal, some sort of item that I probably definitely don't need. But I get this internal angst that if I don't act on it during uh, you know, one of these days I'm going to miss the boat. So it's completely unnecessary. And, and Amazon knows what they're doing when it comes to consumer spending. So I ended up uh, yeah, getting a microwave and a tv. Of course, you know, it's just like, didn't want to miss out and I was like, I might as well just pull the trigger. But um, yeah, going with, going with Prime Day and, and fear of FOMO right there. Uh, let's pass it around to, to our guest, uh, Nathan. Quick intro and, and uh, your pairing.

Speaker D: Yeah, uh, let's see. Nathan, Ms. Uh, uh, co founder, CEO, CX2, uh, uh, electronic warfare veteran, father four. Uh, uh, anyways, uh, I uh, would say uh, uh, guacamole and ranch water. You know, that's what I generally uh, end up doing in my uh, uh, on my Sundays during the summer is I've got my molcajete out there with my ensemble of ingredients including you gotta add a little chili powder to guacamole. That's what everybody always forgets. And then you know, you got the ranch water on the side. That would be your toco shiko plus your tequila plus your lime. You know, it's all set. You're ready to go.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker D: Be creative. Let the juices flow.

Speaker A: Yeah, ranch water is a, uh, if you don't know, you're missing out, uh, it's a delicacy in the drink, uh, uh, world. My wife just actually picked up these kind of like pre mixed ranch waters and it's just not the same. You got to have that topo chico. It's the key ingredient. Um, cool. Thanks again for joining us. Dollar quick. Ah, pass over to you, intro.

Speaker C: Uh, thank you for really, uh, really excited to talk. I'd be here uh, with everyone today and uh, again, Bill young, go buy dollar air sign. 31 years flying jets. Last, uh, job was commanding the 350th spectrum worker wing. I, uh, teach, consult, research and uh, advise. And so my combination is cookies and cream, as in ice cream. And so before I think that that one's so interesting because, um, there are two things that separately are good, but when you put them together they're awesome. That's my personal Kryptonite. Dr. Chris, if you're listening, I only once or twice per week, per year, guidance. But I think it's this notion of integration. And throughout the podcast I think we're going to delve into that because I think that really is the um, killer app of what Nathan and uh, his team is doing along with what a lot of other folks are doing. Um, they're good individually, but man, when you pull them together, that integration is awesome. But that integration is really hard.

Speaker A: An integration as good as cookies and cream. I love it.

Speaker D: Yeah, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Good stuff. Actually one of our simple thesis is that Cx2 is this idea of, you know, Metcalfe's Law coming to the battlefield, that a network, uh, the power of a network is uh, proportional to the square of the number of nodes. As the individual nodes themselves may be crappy and low performing, but the combination of working together is an unstoppable force.

Speaker A: Yeah, let's dive into it. Let's just jump right in. Um, I kind of wanted to start with you, $uh, you know, in terms of the shifting nature of electronic warfare, you know, how has our military's approach towards electronic warfare changed in the recent years?

Speaker C: Yeah, I think that the best way to um, to maybe capture that up, uh, is to go back about 30, 40 years or so. And if you remember at that time everyone was talking about we as the United States military are going to own the night. That was a thing that was going to enable us to have a competitive advantage over our adversaries. Uh, yes, you know, night happens everywhere, so the spectrum is everywhere. Um, but not everyone can fight at night at that time. And so if you pull that forward to today, I think that's the relevant metaphor that we need to be thinking about and that's the reality that we suddenly find ourselves with. Um, we have to be able to fight in the spectrum the same way again over this 40 years of. You look at the onset of Night vision goggles, uh, advanced sensors, all that capability that enabled us to do what we can do today and fight 24 hours a day. That's what I think we really need to get to in the electromagnetic spectrum. And so there's lots of technology, but we need that guiding light or that guiding vision or that guiding strategy to integrate. All back to my cookies and cream.

Speaker A: Yeah. Nathan, what about you? From, uh, a tech perspective, you know what's different now that's allowing companies like CX2 to do things. What's different now than what wasn't possible before?

Speaker D: Well, I think there's just a much wider commercial ecosystem of components, uh, both on the software and hardware side that can be used to build systems that have capabilities that we previously thought were basically exquisite. So I'll just give you an example. Geolocation of emitters used to be a big deal. Only a few platforms could do it. Most tactical platforms couldn't do it. Nowadays, almost everything can do it. We're doing it from drones fairly easily that, uh, are 20, 30 pounds. And you're able to find emitters many kilometers away. By emitters, I'm talking radios, radars, jammers, things like that, uh, even Iot. Uh, the other thing that changed the game is just the proliferation of RF emitters and sensors that exist not just on the battlefield, but in our everyday life. I mean, 40 years ago, you weren't carrying around, you know, one of these in your pocket that has four different bands of transceivers on it, right? And now everything has that. Your fridge has one, most likely. Um, so the. I remember I was at a Dharma conference about maybe seven years ago, and, uh, the CTO of Nvidia gave a talk, and he said that I Predict that by 2030, there will be a trillion IoT devices on the planet. And he actually gave it in terms of powers of 10. So he said, in 1850, there were 10,000 telegram operators. In 1900, there were a million telephones. In, uh, 1950, there was a billion telephones. In 2000, we had a billion cell ph and so on and so forth. Right? And, um, you know, that's the, uh, you know, that's where I think we're just seeing this massive proliferation of autonomous data collectors and systems that, uh, are, you know, now not just ubiquitous to everyday life, but now we're coming to the battlefield and we're seeing them with, you know, the 4 million drones that the Ukrainians are going to field this year, um, on the battlefield, I think the Russians, a similar number, uh, the Numbers are just getting crazy and out of control and the spectrum's getting more crowded. And so it's no longer sufficient to say, I think that there's uh, a uh, spud rest radar over there somewhere to 10 o'. Clock. There's a proliferation of emitters that we have to be very specific about where they are and what they're doing to have to make sense of the battlefield, uh, and really create kind of RF night vision goggles for the battlefield.

Speaker A: Yeah, I want to kind of use a little bit of this as a segue into the work that you guys are doing at CX2. So um, you all kind of outlined this framework of find, fix, uh, finish. Can you break that down for us as it relates to spectrum awareness and autonomy?

Speaker D: Yeah. So you know how we tend to break up. The problem is, you know, what's, you know, the first part is identifying the emitters that are of interest. The second part is figuring out what they are and then characterizing their behavior. And the third part is doing something about it if you don't want them to be there. Right. So that's the finished piece. So we break this up, we build a series of ISR drones that can find, identify and geolocate your detect, identify and geolocate those emitters. And then uh, a set of attack drones, uh, or payloads that attach to attack drones, then can go out and destroy those emitters kinetically. And then eventually, you know, that's sort of the simplest form of it. We call it suppression or destruction of enemy emitters and networks. Uh, and then the next piece is non kinetic effects. You know, can you get close to the thing with a jammer or an EW enabled cyber attack or something like that, uh, and cause not reversible effects for the most part. Right. Um, and that's sort of like traditionally where uh, EW has sort of uh, worked is like we tend to focus on the reversible effects more than the nonrecursible effects. But we talk about find, fix and finish. Uh, that's what we're talking about is how do I find everything on the battlefield, identify what it is that it's a threat to me, and if so, take it out, uh, at the tactical edge, at the lowest echelon of command rather than historically. It's been something held more at kind of the, the division or the core level, strategic level of a conflict, uh, more so than something that's done tactically in an offensive context. And dollar lecture on this all, I'm

Speaker B: sure I'm curious if is the reason for the. The what the way it was historically being more in the command centers because fear of like taking out something that you shouldn't be like what's. Why was it is or is it just technology? I'm just curious what the challenges were that were preventing it from being at that sort of tactical level.

Speaker D: And historically, I mean dollar you, you're more familiar with kind of the history of the doctrine.

Speaker C: Yeah, I think a lot of it had to do and it builds upon Nathan, your point earlier. Um, you had a limited number of assets. And so again I got 200 hours in prowlers. Uh, and so we had a limited number. And I think Nathan, you probably, you worked on Next Gen jammer and the ALQ 99. So the primary jammer that was protecting the uh, US uh air forces and I include Naval Air Force, Naval Air also, uh, it had only a limited number of things that it can jam. And so you might have a battlefield with lots of potential targets. And so what that drove was a prioritization. But that prioritization was always necessitated on um, what are you trying to do? Which ties back to the strategy. And what that gives you is once you knew that, so that's kind of top down driven, then as a planner you could say, okay, based upon the effects that I'm trying to achieve, I don't care about everything on the battle space. There's only a handful of things. So what it enables you to do is use a forward filter to say when I'm trying to find, I know what I'm trying to find. So now if I can, I can very quickly as opposed to trying to figure out what everything is. If I can say, hey, it only lives in this particular frequency band, anything outside of that I don't care about. So that means I'm not wasting my limited processing power on my systems, but also my brain power as the operator. I'm not focused on that, anything outside that. So I know what I'm trying to find. And so in terms of fixing it, well, I know once I know the limitations of what it can and can't do or why I want to fix it. So if it's a mobile, if it's potentially uh, a mobile surface to air missile, then that might be the thing that I need to make sure. I need to figure out exactly where it is. Not for eternity, but for the next 10 minutes while my strike package is going through. So that's, that's what it means to fix and then to finish. All right, maybe I put A harm on it, a high speed anti radiation missile. Or maybe it's enough based on the planned uh, route of flight that I just need to cause a delay. So I just need to buy 10 seconds because uh, that's the time when my strike package is going to be vulnerable if I don't do anything else. But again, all that's driven by what are you trying to do? And that's where the strategy piece becomes

Speaker A: so critically important on the finishing uh, the fight piece. So Nathan, like once you've identified a uh, threat, how does CX2 enable that next step? Are you queuing up a strike automatically or is it passing targeting uh, data to other assets? I'm curious on that piece.

Speaker D: Yeah, so we uh, build a series of home automator seekers, one's uh, called Daedrus, which actually attaches to an FPV drone. That's one of those old virtual reality uh, driven uh, drones, the people, the quadcopters that you see so ubiquitously in Ukraine. And what that does is it provides kind ah, of a compass towards a number of emitters and you can select which one you want, uh, and it'll provide a heading to that in addition to the visual cue. So we've actually used it to find our guys hiding with drone controller and stuff like that out uh, in the field. Um, so it provides a secondary form of id. So there's that sort of augmenting the drone operator and then there's uh, eventually we'd like to go fully autonomous and be able to say, hey, here's the cue to the emitter of interest and have the drone basically fly the whole way in there and then respond to all the different countermeasures in terms of camouflage, concealment, deception, et cetera that it's going to see along the way and just take that emitter out. Um, because if, if it's dependent upon the operator, that means that there's a data link back to the operator and that could be jammed. The position information can be confused. So all that needs to be overcough. Um, something like 30% of the drones that are uh, lost on the Ukrainian side are due to jamming. And that's after years of them going through a Darwinian evolution of days and weeks and months of iterating and iterating and iterating. Russians come in with a new system, they counter it. Then the Russians come in with another, another system, they encounter it again. So you can only imagine the fun that's in store for us when we're not in the middle of that, uh, crucible on a daily basis. So, uh, those are the sorts of things that we're building to deal with the finish problem. And of course, once the drone gets close, uh, it'll light off a warhead at the appropriate range. Take it out.

Speaker A: Yeah, you kind of cued me up for this next question because I was thinking through unmanned kind of teaming is a common practice, but how, how are drones kind of working together to swarm, uh, or coordinate action without human input?

Speaker D: At the moment, right now, not very well. I think you're starting to see, uh, uh, chained autonomous systems to some extent. Probably the most famous recent example was a Russian helicopter was taken out by a Ukrainian unmanned, uh, drone boat launching a. What was it? A. I think it was the sidewinder, wasn't it? $.

Speaker C: Something like that.

Speaker D: Um, so you're starting to see a little bit of that emerge or uh, the Baba Yaga drones that our friends at Skyfall, which big Ukrainian drone, uh, maker that we were partnership with, um, that they built, uh, they actually are able to transport unmanned ground vehicles and things like that closer to the front. Right. So you're starting to see, you know, I, I go. It's kind of like in your. You remember, uh, uh, what was episode one of Star Trek fan or Star Wars Phantom Menace? How you had the uh, uh, the drone ship that came in and launched the drone, uh, raiders that had, you know, full of droids. Right. And sort of like that, where you have multiple levels of autonomy that are all nested within each other. That's eventually where we're going to go. But for now, you know, humans are uh, not sitting on top of that loop. They're intimately involved with every single stage of it. Um, and we have to find a way, uh, through artificial intelligence and better technologies to fire ourselves for a large part of that.

Speaker A: M. Yeah, this is, ah, you and I touched a little bit on this on our discovery call about some of the challenges that Pentagon faces integrating like autonomy into legacy frameworks. Do you want to riff on that for a minute or spitball a little bit on that?

Speaker C: Yeah, no, it's something that I spend a ton of time, uh, working on. So the other thing I spend, uh, again, background wise, is system security engineering. So figuring out how to leverage technology to protect our systems against all of the things that bad guys can do to uh, hack them. And one of the things that I think it's critically important to talk about, it really gets in the leadership is are you risk accepting or risk averse? And the reason why that becomes paramount is that if you are risk averse then yeah, there's lots of things you might be able to do. Technology wise of nesting and, and the technology's able, but you're not going to enable it because you're risk averse because there's lots of things that could go wrong. And then if you're risk accepting then you might tend to push that edge a little bit more. It's not that one's right or one's wrong. Uh, you just have to be able to have a grown up conversation up front about where you are and then you design your operations and your systems accordingly.

Speaker A: I like that, uh, grown. Have a grown up conversation. That's uh, I mean what I think is interesting is.

Speaker B: Sorry, go on.

Speaker C: I'm uh, just going to say it's critical and it drives, it drives your uh, technological evolution. Because also what is part and parcel with that is how much data do you need to trust it. So I'm doing some, we're doing some work now funded by the NSA's uh, Cybersecurity center, really looking at AI trust and what does it mean to build trustworthy AI. And it is absolutely, um, an open question and we're struggling and so Nathan brought up the term crucible and I think that's really going to be what's required. So if you could imagine, sort of uh, fight club for drones.

Speaker D: Mhm.

Speaker C: Gives us the ability to bring, best and breed.

Speaker D: Yeah, that's one of the things, uh, that was in the Hegseth directive that came out last week was the idea that we need to have more drone on drone exercises that uh, we need to create a framework for that. Um, a lot of these questions have been around for a while and we're now just being forced to finally address them. There's a great book from about 10 years ago called army of none by Paul Scherra, uh, that I highly recommend uh, for anyone looking at the topic and it gets into sort of the politics because part of this, the technology can actually like if, if you're willing to kind of set ethics aside and you know, your, your, your value of human life and stuff goes down like I don't know, some of our adversaries, then there's a lot more autonomy that you're willing to tolerate into these systems, um, than we do just based on our own political doctrine, uh, and sort of military doctrine where philosophically we still haven't kind of gotten comfortable with the idea that a robot is going to be able to press a button to take A life or take out a target without having a person somehow present in that loop to make the final decision. Um, chances are some adversary, if they haven't already in Ukraine and Russia, it's arguable they may have, um, or including some of the wars in the Middle east, uh, uh, someone is going to press that button and the drone is going to go down range and then sometime later it's going to see a target that the operator did not see and take it out. Uh, and I was looking at the example. I think there's a drone built by, I want to say it's Rafal from the Israelis, where it's basically a, uh, mine. It's almost like a mine with rotors. It sits there and just sort of waits for a target with motion detection to come by that matches its parameters and then it chases the target, takes it out and it can sit there on a windowsill or whatever. It's probably about, oh, I don't know, uh, um, the size of a rabbit or something. Uh, so those sorts of systems are coming whether we like it or not and we have to understand how to deal with them. It gets back to $'s. What's your risk tolerance for collateral damage? Or you know, uh, perhaps the rules need to be different for something with a 250 gram warhead versus an ICBM.

Speaker A: Yeah, it reminds me, can I just play.

Speaker C: I want to keep.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, go for it.

Speaker C: That was such a great point. Uh, Nathan, I just want to just pull it a little bit more because what I think it points to is the, if anyone wants to ask me what's our biggest gap in all of this, um, what I would tell you is the things that we are calling strategies related to these areas are not by my definition strategies because strategy is about choices. And so we've just gone through a string of choices that have to be made and there's no, there's pluses and minuses, but what we have to have is we have to have alignment of our choices and again we have, have those grown up conversations, uh, make a choice and then the technology has to be aligned to the choices. So for example, if we are going to go small, massive, sworn, let it fly, and we're going to again be risk accepting, then that drive that sends a demand signal to industry. So Nathan is going, okay, got it. Now I understand that you're going to want smaller form factors and we can add more AI to that. Whereas if it's whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, we're not necessarily, we want to have positive Control think sort of a nuclear command and control type of mindset. Well, that drives you to different things just based on that requirement and the problem as we framed it, uh, the choices that we've made even at a high political strategy level have very real technical implementation consequences. And so my concern is that we can't have the grown up conversation where political leaders understand and even senior military leaders understand. Boss, this is the consequences of your decision. Not saying that you're wrong, but you just have to know this is what that means in concrete details. Does that make sense?

Speaker B: It does. I think what you also mentioned, the whole, the data aspect of it. When do you have enough information to know to feel confident is so critical to that. Right. Like is this computer able to make a decision actually better, faster, more more accurately than a human? Like, because I think there's a lot of time, like there's just a lot of times we're like, oh, we want a human in the loop. But the, the fact is a human makes mistakes, computers make mistakes, computers make mistakes faster than any, you know, invention in human history. But you know, those types of things. But like right. When do we feel comfortable that this is enough information that we can make that decision? And I think we, it's too black and white sometimes. We, we want a human, we don't want a human. And there's not enough conversation about that aspect of it. Um, I'm guessing that that's what you're spending a lot of time on.

Speaker C: Absolutely. And that's. But that's where Fight Club would help. So imagine the ability to do rapid innovation so that now people start to understand and it's not the technology in isolation. Again, I'm coming back to the cookies and cream and integration.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker C: It's what happens when you start putting these things together and you start to experience what's called emergent effects, which are properties that at that system level are not found individually in the components. And so you only get that through iterations and sets and reps to learn that. And once you learn that, then you go oh yeah, I like some of that and I don't like that. And then now on your next iteration, then you can do things and put constraints in place to limit the behavior that limit the possible behavior to that acceptable region. But you have to describe that acceptable region in behavioral terms. What does that mean? It means dollar that under these circumstances I have positive confirmation defined as this. I'm this amount of distance from the target. It my blast radius is X. I know that friendlies are outside Of y. Like you have to figure those out and then you can take that level of detail and hand that over to Nathan and his folks and then they can build something to that. It's not about requirements. It's about a much richer understanding of what the need is. Not the requirements, but what the need is, which is all about what are you going to use it for? It because one drone might be perfect under one set of circumstances, but horrible in the other choices. Boss, what are you trying to do?

Speaker A: I, I wanted to quickly just kind of talk through some of the different, uh, domains because I know we're talking a lot about air, but um, like Nathan with CX2, is this operate like, uh, do you have to build for each domain separately or is this purely just for the air domain that URLs technology is operating?

Speaker D: Well, we look at the systems, what we refer to as platforms, as basically just trucks that drive these sensor platforms, drive these sensor nodes around or kinetic nodes around. Right. Um, what we really want to do is have the ability to be pretty much within the limits of, of physics and other things, be more or less agnostic to what the platform is that you're on. I mean, so you could have, you know, uh, a drone boat, we call them USVs, a UAS, you know, a drone, you know, a flying drone, a ground vehicle, ugb, unmanned ground vehicle, all with sensor nodes on them, all sharing information and using that to more quickly find and fix on, on targets so that somebody, uh, can't hide and that you're able to take, uh, advantage of, um, take advantage of multiple vectors to solve the same problem in multiple platforms. Right. Um, all of them use the spectrum to some degree or another. Even if the system's still fully autonomous, at some point they're going to have to report back to base and say, I'm still here or I accomplished my mission. Right. Um, the one exception to that of course, is getting a lot of tension in Ukraine is these tethered drones. Uh, but even then I think that a lot of people are kind of making that out like this is the silver bullet and you go talk to some Ukrainians and they'll tell you, no, no, no, it's used in a very specific set of missions under limited circumstances and only when they can't get through with anything else. Right. Uh, the reality of it is is that the electromagnetic spectrum is a fifth domain of warfare. And if you do not have spectrum dominance, uh, then you will not be able to command and control all these autonomous systems effectively. Uh, and you know, you can find some ways around it, but uh, at the end of the day they're going to have to phone home at some point and they're going to have to look up at some point figure out where the heck they are.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. $This was something that I think, uh, you and I briefly touched on as well, was that you had spoken about spectrum as like the connective tissue across domains, land, sea, airspace, maybe just your, your two cents on that or, or break that down for, for the listeners.

Speaker C: Yeah, I think Nathan is exactly right that the electromagnetic spectrum is a domain. By any definition of a domain, the electromagnetic spectrum satisfies whatever attributes you have ascribed to it, period. And so if you, going back to the earlier point about Internet of things, if you don't have the electromagnetic spectrum to connect all those devices, you just have a bunch of things, you don't have an Internet of things. And so, um, if we go back 100 years and look at the rise of air power, you look at uh, Julio Duhet who says, hey, if I could jump over all these fielded forces and strike directly at the enemy's center of gravity, its capital, I think I can win the war, I can achieve our policy ends. And so for 100 years you have technology chasing an idea or a theory of victory. I think the problem with the electromagnetic spectrum because we have refused to acknowledge, now our adversaries have acknowledged it and treated as a domain we haven't elected not to. The consequence of that is that we have a bunch of ideas or, I'm sorry, a bunch of technology going different directions. It's all good individually, but we don't have the connective tissue to pull it all together and make our cookies and cream. Again, it's notion of integration and that cookies and cream of pulling it all together in order to achieve the policy aim. And so, uh, that's what's missing. I think that to me again that's the big gap is that centralized idea of how we pull it all together to achieve our policy ends.

Speaker A: Yeah, it was kind of like my uh, bow on the conversation was going to be leading to that of five years from now what, what a fully kind of integrated electronic warfare strategy looks like. How does that, how do you, how do you describe that?

Speaker C: Yeah, I think a fully integrated strategy five years from now has a core, the core nugget is answering the question where are we going to play and how are we going to win? And so our, we can't say we're going to do everything across the entire spectrum, but we have to pick where are those particular bands, that, that's where we're going to focus disproportionately the majority of our effort, that's where we're going to hedge our bets. And then we still have to decide how we're going to win there. So what does that mean? Does it mean agility? Does it mean denial for an adversary? Any number of things. And once we answer that critical question, then we can describe the capabilities that will be required to win, where we want to win and how we want to play there. That's the critical piece that's missing.

Speaker A: Nathan, anything you wanted to add on top of that?

Speaker D: Yeah, I think, I think, uh, the other thing that we need to start thinking about is I think most electronic attack up to this point, when we talk about domains, the other domains are manifest in space. Uh, uh, what's the Murphy's Law of Combat? An infantryman only occupies the space on which he stands. Uh, in the electromagnetic spectrum we have higher and higher levels of abstraction. So down at the bottom you have the physical layer where jamming actually takes place in initial emissions. And then you go up into the data lake layer and so on and so forth up into the OSI stack. And I think most effects have been Dominan down below. And then there's sort of a delineation between what we would call the cyber, cyber domain and electronic attack. And that's starting to get very blurred and you're starting to see complex and exquisite effects within that. And particularly as we talk about network behavior. Right. Most communication systems today, including your cell phone, we're moving away from direct one v, one links towards one v, many links, um, and those one v many, uh, links, uh, you know, have different behaviors that have to be analyzed and understood. And so one of the things we have to do and one of the reasons why we need this proliferation of sensor nodes, because if everybody was one well behaved, as long as you have line of sight, you could eventually kind of process your way through it. But when everybody starts to be dynamic and forming ad hoc networks and what have you, kind of like what we saw with the Russians in Operation, uh, Spiderweb, where for the Russians and Ukrainians in Operation Spiderweb, where a few drones were able to basically connect to the Internet to a land, uh, party back in Kyiv, uh, and uh, over the Russian cell phone networks they were able to, uh, conduct uh, a bombing raid that probably cost billions of dollars in damage to strategic assets. Right. The idea is that you're going to have more dynamic systems that Require a lot more uh, observability points to intercept, to not just detect, but intercept them. And what I say, there's a distinction between detection and interception because detection just says, hey, there's some energy over there. I think it may be this. In this part of the spectrum, identification is what it's for. Right. And we're starting to get into the realm of uh, the spy versus spy aspect of it in terms of low probability of intercepted detection and emissions controls and stuff. And that's going to become much more prolific. So you're dealing with a much more complex ecosystem than we were dealing with maybe 30 or 40 years than even 10 years ago. Right. And how things have evolved in Ukraine and Russia, uh, is a sneak preview for what we may face in a future near career conflict.

Speaker A: Yeah, I'm sorry Dal, I didn't know

Speaker D: if you were gonna.

Speaker C: I was gonna say. Yeah, I was just gonna build on Nathan's point about complexity. Um, this is where uh, abstraction is how we deal with complexity.

Speaker D: Period.

Speaker C: That's how we as humans deal with it. And useful abstraction is a model. The quote from George Fox, all models are wrong, some are useful. Utility is a function of what are you trying to do? Does your abstraction help you think more clearly? Again, choices that you're trying to make? And that's why having a, a strategy and a theory that treats the electromagnetic spectrum holistically is really useful. Because one of the things about a theory is that it helps you understand what's important. So now I don't have to dig into all the technical details necessarily. I could abstract all that up, uh, to a level that a decision maker can make a good decision on. But you don't get there. I believe without a strategy and it lays out those deliberate choices. And it's not a good versus right versus wrong choice, it's a right versus right which is the writer. Again, where do you want to play? That is a deliberate choice. But once you make it, you will whittle out whole sets of capabilities and that's okay. But what you need is alignment from top to bottom. Otherwise you got nothing. It will fall apart.

Speaker A: Yeah, we need to get to that cookies and cream integration. Um, we got some work to do. Uh, I just wanted to close with a couple of quick hits on, on CX2, Nathan. So you know, just ah, some, some high level in terms of, you know, where you guys are, are headquartered, headcount funding. Be great to hear.

Speaker D: Yeah. So uh, we're at about 30 people. Uh, our headquarters is in El Sega. No otherwise Known as Gundo, uh, or so it's known as to the tech investor capital community. But in all seriousness, uh, there's more PhDs per square mile, uh, in El Segundo, uh, during the workday than pretty much anywhere else except for maybe Cambridge, Massachusetts, uh, or Silicon Valley. Right. There's just an enormous amount of technical hardware talent, uh, here in South Bay. And I can't go out to dinner without running into another co founder, uh, or actually where I used to meet when I was doing angel investing, where I used to meet investing, uh, opportunities was at the pitch and Putt torrents. I just strike up a conversation with the guy in front of me. Uh, so, uh, we are a series A company. We've raised about $46 million uh, to date. Uh, we're backed by ABC, uh, Andreessen Horowitz and 0.72, some of the best firms in defense. Uh, and we're moving fast and we're hiring. So please check us out. Cx2 dot. Uh, you know, we're, we're looking to hire some of the best and brightest, uh, engineering talent and also business development talent because we're firmly in our go to market stroke right now and we've participated in uh, uh, two exercises this year. We're about to do, uh, our third and fourth and fifth in the next few weeks. Probably uh, have close to 10 by the end of the year. And uh, we're going pretty strong to get stuff in the hands of the customers who can actually do some good at times. So that's very cool. That's what we're doing to help the U.S. uh stay dominant, uh, from us to ensure spectrum dominance. It says actually it's on my coffee cup. Or actually it's caffeine.

Speaker A: There you go. Nice. Yeah, uh, we'll definitely give a plug to the careers page, uh, when we promote this and uh, dig a little bit more into the culture on our final segment. So I'll just kind of put a bow on, on the main discussion at this point. I'm sure we'll have a follow up that we could uh, riff on uh, down the line guys, but uh, for this uh, we'll wrap and, and enter uh, the final segment of the episode which is the five second scramble. So it's just rapid fire Q A spitball. Your, your first answer that comes to mind. Try to keep it within five seconds. Um, Mike, why don't you lead with a uh, dollar and then I'll, I'll close with Nathan.

Speaker B: Sounds good. All right, uh, here we go $. Uh, what's one thing you wish people understood about working in the tech in defense?

Speaker C: Tech strategy. Strategy. Strategy and product market fit because the two are one and the same. Who are you trying to serve and what is your critical insight on the population that you're trying to serve?

Speaker B: What's the most impactful, uh, tech trend you're tracking right now?

Speaker C: Um, the explosion of artificial intelligence in all its many forms. Some will be a bust, but some of it's going to be really good.

Speaker B: Uh, if you could instantly fix one government tech challenge, what would it be?

Speaker C: The authority to operate.

Speaker B: Nice. What advice would you give someone starting out their career?

Speaker D: Um,

Speaker C: learn your trade, don't play scared and make a difference.

Speaker B: Uh, what's one, um, military leadership skill you, you think has been most valuable to you?

Speaker C: Um, sir, this. As you're promoted. It's a pyramid that goes up. I always tell people that you are promoted based upon your potential to serve in the next higher grade. So you need to take that pyramid and turn it upside down and you should view it as the opportunity as you get promoted more as above you and you're actually going down and you have the opportunity to serve more people.

Speaker B: Nice. Uh, what was your, uh, dream job as a kid?

Speaker C: Um, I think it was being a military officer and getting a chance to fly.

Speaker B: Awesome. What was your first car?

Speaker C: Uh, 1976. Ah, Camaro.

Speaker B: Oh, sweet. Uh, what charity or cause is near and dear to you?

Speaker C: Um, anything related to service of the Lord, so deep Christian faith and any opportunity that I get to express that and uh, just so where that comes out is in the people that I get a chance to help. I mean, you have to love the people and fall in love with the problem and then that gives you just all the more energy to help them develop a good solution.

Speaker B: Uh, what was your favorite Disney character?

Speaker C: Uh, Dumbo.

Speaker B: All right, and last one. Uh, on the fly. Favorite, uh, or most memorable call sign from, uh, from your, your days in the service.

Speaker C: Fam. Uh, F word. Almost hit me. Nice.

Speaker D: I got it.

Speaker A: Fhm. Gotcha. Awesome. Good stuff. Uh, Nathan, you ready?

Speaker D: Yeah.

Speaker A: All right. If, uh, CX2 were an animal, what animal would it be?

Speaker D: An ocelot.

Speaker A: What's uh, what's one thing that gets you fired up, uh, for the work day, each day?

Speaker D: Uh, two cups of coffee. Actually, actually I, I take that back. It's, it's uh, uh, my, my five year old trying to sneak into the bedroom, letting the dog out of the crate and, and trying to think that she some, that somehow I don't notice her.

Speaker A: That'll get you fired up. And then the two cups of coffee. Um, what, uh, what kind of builder thrives, uh, at CX2?

Speaker D: I think, uh, somebody, uh, who can take an ambiguous, uh, set of requirements and just start iterating. Uh, and, uh, it is, is what we think outside the box.

Speaker A: You touched on this earlier, but just to reiterate, what, what are some of these tech roles that you're anticipating hiring for over the next three to six months?

Speaker D: Uh, some guidance and, uh, navigation control people, uh, back end and forward end software with a heavy emphasis on signal processing. Some antenna people, RF people, drone people, uh, an EW architect, et cetera.

Speaker A: Uh, when you're working late nights, uh, what's your go to snack?

Speaker D: Uh, geez. Uh, let's see. Uh, probably. Geez, that's probably not a good thing. That probably explains this.

Speaker A: What, uh, you may have touched on this, actually a book or podcast you've recommended the most this year.

Speaker D: Uh, I would say Martin Gary's Revolt of the Public.

Speaker B: I would.

Speaker D: Most important read of the last 20 years.

Speaker A: Uh, what is one of the most unexpected places that you've ever traveled to?

Speaker D: Um. Oh, geez. Yeah, let's see. Uh, I got marooned in Newport, Oregon once. My, uh, dad's, uh, boat blew ahead on the engine and we had to get towed in by the Coast Guard. And uh, yeah, it's beautiful there, but, you know, there's nothing there if you're not from there.

Speaker A: Newport, Oregon, is that right?

Speaker D: Yeah, um, you know, yeah, that I just serve a random one.

Speaker A: But, um, what was your, your very first job?

Speaker D: I was a chum boy on my dad's tuna vote.

Speaker A: Oh, that's awesome. What's the charity or cause that's near and dear to you?

Speaker D: Um, you know, we, we've been members for a couple years of a group called the, uh, Israel Venture Fund that backs a number of Jewish nonprofits. Um, so they've been particularly active since October 7th with, uh, a lot of rehabilitation for the victims and their families.

Speaker A: Very cool. We'll plug both of those as well in, in the, uh, in the show notes. Uh, and then last one, you know, what's one thing that you hope AI never replaces?

Speaker D: Well, can't. It can't replace the love you get from your kids.

Speaker A: Just can't answer. Number one answer. Um. Cool. That's it, man. That's a wrap, guys. Thank you so much for joining us, for having us.

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah.

Speaker A: This was a, this was a good one. It was a helpful episode. And, uh, again, pushing towards spectrum dominance down the line. Thank you for joining us on the podcast.