The Team House - Game of Drones: The Future of Warfare w/ Chad McCoy | EYES ON | Ep. 35

Episode Date: August 13, 2024

Support the show on Patreon:⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouseToday were joined by Chad McCoy, former 24th STS Operator, and co-founder/Chief Strategy Officer of Firestorm Labs, a low cost drone manufacturer. Chad talks with us about what the future of drone warfare could look like for the US and abroad.Firestorm Labs:⬇️https://www.launchfirestorm.com/Chad McCoy's LinkedIn:⬇️https://www.linkedin.com/in/jchadmccoy/Chad's Team House episode:⬇️https://youtube.com/live/30F3vXmoflUFind Andy here:⬇️Twitterhttps://twitter.com/i/flow/login?redirect_after_login=%2Fandymilburn8LinkedInhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewmilburn2023Substackhttps://amilburn.substack.com/Andy's bookhttps://www.amazon.com/When-Tempest-Gathers-Mogadishu-Operations/dp/1526750554#drones  #dronewarfareBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

Hey guys, it's Jack. I just wanted to talk to you today about a way that you can help support the podcast if you're not already. To support the channel is to become a Patreon member. So we have Patreon memberships that start at just $5 a month. And when you sign up, you get access to all of our episodes ad free. That's the big bonus for that. I mean, we also do some Patreon bonus episodes for our subscribers. But this is the biggest and best way that you can support the Team House. channel and podcast if you'd like to. And we really appreciate that. So go it and check us out at patreon.com slash the team house. Hello, everyone. I'm Andy Milburn. And there is, there is D. we're down to just to host for this episode of Eyes On, but no matter because we have an extremely exciting guest, Chad McCoy. I say that. I know some people will say about every guest. But But Chad in particular is a nugget. We're very glad to have for a number of reasons that you will find out over the course in the next hour.

Just a little bit about Chad. Some of you guys will have probably seen him on the team house. He did an excellent episode. There's a few months back, right? I think it's over a year now. Was it really? Look him up on the team house because anyone who is familiar with the Air Force Special Operations who even knows a little about it may well have heard of Chad.

He's a, you know, he will avoid the term expert, but I would challenge AFSOC to find someone who knows honestly more about this, the business, everything from combat controlling. And he gives a fascinating rundown of how that evolved in J-Soc where he spent most of his career all the way up to the problems that he's dealing with now since getting out of Avsock with drones, which we're going to turn over to him now to talk about. So, Chad, welcome, and the floor is yours.

To begin with, we'd love to hear perhaps not your origin story. We've heard all of that, but your origin as a civilian story, transition, and what you've been doing since getting out of the military. Yeah, thanks, Andy. Dee, yeah, I appreciate allowing me to talk on something that's near and dear to my heart, not only because as a business owner, this is what I do day to day, but also because I believe that this is fundamentally a shift in tactics, employment, and strategy. And so me being a part of that, you know, kind of rewind the tape a little bit to when I got out.

You know, it started with a transition that's painful for most military guys. it wasn't easy. You know, I've talked to other folks about transition in the past, but that's a whole new selection, right? So when you get out of the military, you got to find a home, you got to find a team. Usually the first one you land on, it's not where you stop, you know, you stop. It's kind of like, you know, going to the Army as an 11 Bravo and then you go to selection and you keep kind of climbing the runs of where you can go.

Transitions much the same. It's got different challenges. And candidly, my life in, in business has been just as hard or harder than my military career in a different way, mentally exhausting, long hours, long days, not necessarily a physical threat, you know, but certainly there's lots of snakes in the grass and not the landmines. And people are probably more dangerous on the outside in the business world than they are, you know, within a team room or within an organization of trusted people.

So learning a lot and hopefully have a lot to share with guys so they don't make the same mistakes I did when I got out. So how did you transition to starting up your own business, specifically Firestorm? And, you know, how did it come together? And what was the catalyst? What is the problem you're trying to solve? Yeah, so my first job at the military, I was working at an innovation institute that supports munitions. development in Florida. And I did that for about a year.

I did for, no, I did it for exactly a year. I told my wife, I was ready for something else. I just wanted a different challenge. I wanted to maybe be in an organization that was willing to take a little bit more risk and change some paradigms. The U.S. DoD, it's a slow-moving machine as most know, not only on the acquisition side, but on the development side. So usually programs, they don't.

They're not like one to two year programs to build a new missile or bomb. It's a 10-year program. And so a lot of times what we see in the past 20 years is that when an operator says, hey, I have a requirement, 10 years is insufficient. And by the time you get that requirement fulfilled, the technology could potentially is obsolete. And so within special operations, which got a really good wrap for tech adoption, they were doing COTS.

So basically commercial off-the-shelf solutions just to rapidly integrate something. And so it wasn't perfect, but it worked. And so even in business now, I continue to reiterate that it doesn't have to be perfect, just has to be done. And so 80% sometimes it's good enough. And that certainly is the thought process in soft. And so DGI drones, when they initially came on the battlefield, it was because, you know, if the U.S. was going to build a quadcopter, you know, it was going to cost them probably a billion dollars. And it would probably do half the things that the Chinese can make for, you know, under a thousand. And so, you know, the expectations of what we receive were in my face in that role.

And I realized I wasn't going to change that system. And so when I left that, you know, that position, which was a great position, it was a good learning experience for me. I was introduced to a couple of guys out of California. And their intention was to democratize the air through low-cost cruise missiles. And can you just explain that term very quickly, democratize? Yeah, I know it's on your website and I've heard it before. Makes perfect sense, but you know, go.

Yeah, democratize everything, right? Demarcotizing the air is giving, you know, countries, smaller countries like Ukraine, a fighting chance to, you know, stand up against, you know, larger countries with billions of dollars of military equipment. And so if really the air can be accessible, which it wasn't in years past, right, it was fixed-wing assets that had to be survivable, you know, you had, have huge defense budgets to achieve that mass or that those effects on target, democratizing the air made it accessible to everybody.

And so this concept of a $10,000 cruise missile wasn't really super compelling for me because I knew how good the big defense primes were at building those systems. Like, they're excellent at it. And so despite all the criticism of the defense primes, you know, defense industrial complex, they do a lot of things really well. They build fifth-gen fighters better than anybody in the first. planet, right? They build aircraft carriers, all these big things. But when you go into the smaller scale, there's not a huge incentive for them to do it. And so the idea of Firestorm initially was,

let's build these systems low cost, let's figure out a way. And as we started peeling back the ending in our first conversation with the other two co-founders, the discussion was, well, we can 3D print these systems. And then I started thinking, I was like, okay, I'm thinking edge manufacturing, right? I'm thinking as a soft guy, if we can 3D print them here, It can be three-dron there. And then it was, you know, here's the kind of the fuselage and frame. And I'm thinking, well, it doesn't have to be a cruise missile. It could really be anything that flies.

And as a soft guy knowing that we're not going to have air support, right? You're not going to have ISR. You're not going to have strike assets. You're not going to have PR Kazavag. Because we're talking great power competition, they own the skies just as much as we do. And I started thinking, I was like, man, you could have basically all four missions in an aircraft. So ISR, EW non-kinetics, kinetic, and then you can even use decoys with these systems. And you start looking at it like a truck.

It doesn't have to be a weapon. Now it just serves the operator. And so I joined with these guys right in the beginning, and we were off to the races in 22. So what we aspired to do is democratize the air through systems that were at one low cost, that were accessible worldwide through a new manufacturing process that has really come a long way. And 3D printing, we 3D printer a drone in nine hours and can fly in 36. But that, it changes a paradigm completely because a lot of systems take six to eight weeks to build one. And you can't create mass at the edge.

And they're super expensive. And so if I'm an airman in the field and I want to go launch this thing, go strike a target, and I crash it, what's the implications of that? Even for training, if I crash a $400,000 drone in training, what's going to happen to me personally? And so then you become risk-adverse. You start taking less chances in training, which is where we should take most chances in training.

And then employment of the systems, like how many systems can I get on target? And you know as well as I do, Andy, like we don't shoot one system. We launch two to make one. And usually it's three or four. And so that's the genesis of it. there's a ton of that I'm missing in here but that's just kind of the high level of what we're trying to do

it it's um the the competitive edge that that the more sophisticated richer militaries have enjoyed you know for for for decades is gone um you know the the reliance on air superiority um and then you know at the and you describe it very well and at the same time you know for instance in Yemen I mean, we talked about Ukraine and Yemen. We've got a Houthi rebel group now that's using cheap Iranian guidance kits to build, you know, anti-ship missiles that are having an effect on global trade. And, yes, largely a token strike, but nevertheless strike Tel Aviv and inflict casualties. That's right. You know, over a thousand miles away.

Great examples of what I think you are talking about. Yeah, the Shaheeds are really showing the world what's capable and the, long-range precision strike and they're a very capable aircraft you know they're obviously um the arraining governments you know pumping those systems to make them cheaper uh so i don't know what they really cost to produce you know without um you know the co-op that exists with iran but um but yeah you're right i mean the huthies the huthies i mean i was out there during a civil war in yemen um the huthies are capable i mean they marched on sanaan they came all the way down the coast i mean they're a capable force, but they never represented a strategic threat.

It's the world. Now they're a strategic threat to trade, which is probably the biggest threat we have. That's scarier than, you know, potentially loss of life. I mean, because you think about implications of shutting down the straight-Harmuz or, you know, the traffic through, you know, the Gulf of Aden, that's going to cripple the U.S. economy just as much as everyone else. So, Chad, I wanted to, you know, we talk about. about the proliferation of drone technology that allows democratization, right?

It's, you know, things like consumer electronics, right? The ubiquity of consumer electronics. But at the same time, ironically, there are things that are hampering US and not just US, but on the drone side, the fact, for instance, that the Russians have turned, you know, EW into this kind of magic box of area denial, right, for drones. I mean, the Ukrainians have struggled with this. They're losing between hundreds and thousands of drones, you know, every, every month, according to estimates.

They're estimating now that they've got a production goal of something like 2 million drones for next year. I mean, these numbers and these lessons are staggering for us in the U.S., but I'm not sure that we're saying what you are, I mean, that everyone is saying what you are I mean, what are your thoughts about all of this? So Ukraine is, I'll be very careful how I word this like it's important, but Ukraine is teaching the world a lot of lessons that we wouldn't have known otherwise. And the timing for those lessons are essential for us to respect and learn from. They have been able to grind, you know, one of the largest and most capable militaries to a hall using commercial systems.

and then the disparity between, you know, cost of defensive assets or, you know, or Blue Force assets on adversarial. I mean, we're talking, you know, I saw a couple of graphs, you know, like a million to a billion, but the disparity is enormous. And so typically the U.S. government, specifically the U.S. Air Force, there's a bit of a hubris of, like, what we can do with our capabilities. And you're absolutely right. We've always done these things in simulation. and we've always done them in exercises of Nellus where we stimulate a lot of these threats. But we don't put red air against these things and actually shoot them down, right? And EW is grinding things, you know, especially small systems to hold. We talk about alt navigation.

And so alt P&T, this is a pretty essential aspect for us to address. And we're getting those reps in Ukraine right now, collectively, the collective we, the global we. Can you explain what that is? Real quick. Sure. Yeah, precision navigation and timing. Just how, you know, so we have, you have GPS, but you also have different ways to get a system to from point A to point B. And when you have jammers, whether it be GPS or RF jammers, those systems don't know where they are at all times.

And so there are, there are higher end ways to find your position, like let's call it celestial navigation. It's been around for a long, long time. But it's not cheap, right? the next one is you know you can go off an asthma and fly and hope you get a GPS log throughout the position but the other one's visual navigation right so now you have a downward facing camera that is potentially doing the same thing you and I would do with a map and compass off of known points on a map and then you have FPV which has changed the world right so this you know this these FPV drones basically are controlled by you know ground operators at the tactical level

and they're able to achieve effects on, you know, tanks with a drone that cost them less than $1,000. And we've never seen that before because guerrilla warfare, and it's been a very small group of capable people that can get close enough to a target to affect it, now you have standoff and you can proliferate that technology to everyone in the ground force and completely grind everyone to a standstill, including the U.S. government. And so what the USG is figuring out now is that this is a threat that we have to, you know, be able to take on. And our legacy counter UAS systems that we use in Syria and Iraq, those RF systems don't work. And so we're learning the cat and mouse game of technology adoption. And us as a company, we have to be really attuned to what's going on and be able to change very quickly. So if you build the best product for today and it can't future proof for tomorrow, it's going to be obsolete. the same way that 10 years cycle of weapons development is because the Russians will figure out

a countermeasure to every single thing that's put on the battlefield. And it is a cat and mouse game every day. And in Ukraine, as you know, Andy, like, they are small shops, R&D shops of young, you know, young kids and young adults, young kids, older kids, young adults that are literally building systems for Altnav, P&T, all those all P&T things on laptops with Saudi and I is next to them. in unassuming locations, and they're able to build what the big defense primes were charging the U.S. government millions of dollars to do, and we never received it. And so what this is doing is changing, it's changing in multiple paradigms.

It's changing the paradigm of what tech adoption is, but it's also changing acquisition strategies across the world. So all the, you know, first world countries are going, holy crap, how do we get things faster? and it has to come down to an expectation of what we want the defense contractors or defense primes or even the smaller companies provide. And then you have to ensure that you don't have these giant monopolies that vendor lock systems that prevent the future proofing of systems, right? Because there's no incentive for, you know, pick your defense prime.

I won't piss anybody off on this, but pick your defense prime and you build the perfect UAS and you vendor lock the radios that you have to go to them for every update, right? What we've done is we said, absolutely not. We're going to do fully open systems architecture on this, and we're going to create the SDKs and provide them to the folks on the ground so they can basically integrate their new sensor,

their EW payload, their new camera, and we don't need to get paid for that. We want them to have an iPhone for an UAS. You're giving them the right to continuous software updates. Yes. And that should be a standard. It should be our call to action as a nation to provide that for the soldier, Sierra Marine and airmen on the front lines because everyone needs these now.

And it's not service specific. It's certainly service agnostic. So it's really interesting that you're talking about this because Zelensky, I think just a couple of months ago, but Zelensky, Ukrainian president, for those who am being following the news last few years, He's created an unmanned systems force, right? But it's not, you know, it's not like a space force stand alone. It's fully integrated throughout the military.

I mean, there are drone units, drone squadrons now integrated and linked to conventional forces. And I believe Ukraine's the first country to have done this. They've restructured their military based on drone capability in the middle of a war, right? Because they had to. And we are so, you know, I just can't imagine the United States turning on a darn way. I mean, I don't mean that's not undermining ourselves. I'm just saying we're very cumbersome by. Well, let me tell you what I've learned since being on the other side of the fence outside the military.

I've learned that there are our pockets of folks within the USDA that get that completely, and they are changing the script. And so it's easy to be pessimistic about the state of things because of, you know, these legacy processes. I get that. I'm frustrated with it just the same as everyone else. But what I'm seeing right now, and pick your service, everyone has them. They're saying, how do we employ these systems? And they're doing it at smaller scale, which they have to, right? Because you're changing maneuver forces now. And now what, but what I think the technology has to provide to make that adoption ubiquitous across the military is it has to be so easy that the 18-year-old private

can pull out of a box and not get training and still launch it and use it. And so typically, there's a training requirement for every system. You have to be a UAS pilot, something you have to be part 107. And the system you see behind me, this little group one system we're building, the intent is you hand-launch the system.

It's sub-10,000 dollars, has a two-pound munition, and it goes into TAC, which is basically this, this tactical software that everybody has based on the Samsung phone now. And it's proliferating across the forces.

But basically Uber for a cast, right? So you say, I've got a target beyond that ridge line. I can't shoot it with my rifle. Usually this is when a mortar team would come out and they would launch 10 mortars to maybe get on target if they're lucky. Now I'm saying you launch this thing up with two systems, one spots for you, potentially does a buddy lays if you have a more exquisite system. And then you strike it with limited CDE, limited shots, right? And then we can keep moving the convoy. And if we had these during the GY days, the LMAMs that we initially had out in, you know, in,

you know, Afghanistan and Iraq, that you had to have, there was precision involved in this, you actually had to know what you're doing to hit something. And so the use case that a lot of the big, the big prines were saying is like, you've got a guy put an ID on the side of the road. Now we can strike him from, you know, 2K out.

Well, yeah, sometimes you can hit that far. Sometimes they would loss lane and go crash in the desert. What I'd like to see is a system that you literally pull out of a backpack, you clip the wings in, right? Because it's so small, it's just like an AT4 or or smaller than AT4, hopefully, a law rocket.

And we launched this thing up by hand. So a vertical takeoff and landing. Thrust vector controls, the controls that move the motor. We launched this thing up and we go strike targets at 3.5K. And we do it for sub $10,000. Now we have an economy. And that's something you can proliferate to every single soldier within the 18th Airborne Corps. Which is a world away from our current model, you know, with very expensive systems.

Super expensive, yeah. But, you know, it's certainly the only practical, the most practical solution that I've heard to this, you know, this buzzword concept, any sensor, any shooter, because what you're talking about is any sensor best shooter. And it's AI that figures that out, essentially, right? Yeah. That's the big one. You know, so all that web pairing, all that stuff's happening. Yeah. Virtue of AI.

And that kind of gets us to autonomy, right? Because, you know, you talked about a very basic, I mean, you took a very basic method of, or basic methods of getting around GPS blocking, you know, terrain mapping, being, being one of them. But that gets increasingly more sophisticated. And the goal now essentially is having systems that are so autonomous that they not only can bypass countermeasures, but strike, make decisions and strike by themselves. Can you, you know, you talk about this a little bit on your website. You know, you use the terms, but I know it's an immensely tough topic to talk about for ethical terms too.

And, you know, with an I don't have any issues. I mean, I mean, I. What I meant is explaining. Yeah, Chad, I don't think anyone here has any issues, but explaining that to civilians that it's not an issue, you know. Yeah, this isn't, I mean, is it a killer robot? I guess it is a killer robot. It's a bit dramatic, though. So there's a couple of things I'll back up on.

So AI is such a broad term. It's misused all the time. The military loves to misuse it. Our head of autonomy, it rolls its eyes. Anytime anyone says AI, including me. But when you talk about AI, you got to have it in that. Because Dee's got to use it in as buzzword. You just sprinkle it in a random sentence.

I'll be talking to like a landscaper and be like, you know, does this machine have AI in it. It's on, it's on D's Tinder profile. Yeah, yeah. So AI, yeah, Altnav is AI empowered and driven. I mean, it's really the compute and the back end to be able to make decisions that a human typically had to, right? So we're talking about analog switches on and off. Well, you know, can the sensor determine what it needs to do next? And so, you know, that's, again, that's proliferated across almost every aspect of what we do now.

But the thing that you're talking about is what we call ATR. And so, you know, it's this target recognition, you know, these algorithms, to, you know, it's glorified object detection. And so within a camera system, you have a back end and then the AI or the compute on the camera is able to look at a target and say, not even use a target, an object and say that's a vehicle. Okay, cool. So if we put these mission parameters in and say, we want to find vehicles, you know,

it can loosely kind of find that. When it gets the next step, it's like, okay, what color are you looking for or what type of vehicle? And then now we're starting to go down the list of now we need the data sets. whether they be synthetic data sets. So basically we design them and train the models on synthetic or we train them on real datasets, which are, let's say it's a system that only China has and we don't know what it looks like. We can't do that until we have that real data set.

And so that's when the military comes in and I say all those folks. But when you have that, you can start training the models. You have to train them from every angle. And so once the brains of these systems can find a target, lock on it, do object detect, determine, you know, through this, you know, this probabilistic, you know, kind of data and say, okay, this is it. Well, then you still have a human in the loop, right? So now it's like, we need to say yes to that.

Well, the problem is, Andy, what you just described is what happens when you're beyond line of sight or you're fully jammed. And now the expectation that system is, is to make a decision with a strike. That happened in Libya. And as you guys know, the first fully autonomous strike was done in Libya. I think it was in 2018 or 2017. It was a long time ago. Can you talk about that, chat?

Yeah, I mean, I'll tell you what I know. I mean, I wasn't out there when it happened. But I forget who owned the drone. People said it was the Russians. I don't know who actually was going to, you know, send it up. But it was a fully autonomous strike in Libya with a UAS, a small UAS. And it was lethal. And it was the first time that it had been a complete autonomous strike

without a human loop. And it scared everybody. And it scared everybody because there was no policy. behind it, like how do you control this? But what I would argue is, and I'm not arguing for fully autonomous systems just yet, but I think you're going to lower the collateral damage. I think you're going to have higher effectiveness of systems because a human can make mistakes, right? And so can an optical system, right? To be a cloud, something could change, maybe the geometry is different, and it doesn't know how to process that. So right now we're not there yet.

But I think in the future, this can actually be a safer way to conduct warfare. And then I'll take a step back and go to Ukraine. And so if we have a flaw, right, and we have a linear, you know, kind of forward edge of the battle space, and we're saying this is the flat, anything on here is bad, everything of the side is good. Well, there's no civilians walking in and out of that area, right? So this is just little green men we're fighting. Now, when you launch systems up there and they find a human, I think you have a 99.9% chance that it's the right person, right? And so when you have a linear battle space, it's very easy to kind of process this type of warfare. But when we put that in an urban context and we're saying it's an HVI and maybe it's a seeker that's honing in on an electronic

signal. So typically, you know, in my former life, we'd hunt cell phones, right? And the individual hopefully is associated with cell phone. And a lot of times houses got dropped because the cell phone was in there. Right. And we said, okay, high confidence, right place, right time. We drop it. Well, well, crap, man.

like you don't know who's in that building. And so a lot of, you know, innocent lives were lost on a human-in-the-loop targeting model. You know, but for the guy who's walking on the street with a cell phone, right place, right time, and now we can start doing facial detection, right? Maybe it's a quadcopter that locates him, protects his ears, and spacing, he's the right guy. We have high confidence, the probability is high, and it goes and strikes on its own. Like, tell me that's not safer than dropping J-DAMs on entire, you know, buildings with, women and children just to kill one guy. I think that's a spray and prey that we should be done.

Yeah, we already, you know, a couple of points from that, I think, you know, I mean, in support. One is we've been using autonomous weapons actually for a long period of time, you know, I mean, they've been mostly in kind of self-defense, like, not C-RAM, what's it? SeaWIS. SeaWIS, yeah, right? But, you know, to your point specifically. about the reliability of human decisions versus the emerging, emergent reliability of AI. In the medical profession, they're already, based on, you know, the experimentation, as you know,

they've already seen that diagnosis. Certainly, you know, for instance, cancer diagnosis, AI is becoming statistically far more proficient than a human provider, you know, based on being shown the same evidence as it were. I'm not wording it well, but you understand what I'm saying. So we're already putting lives in the hands in a positive way of AI, right? Yes, a medical, a human still backs that up, but it's AI that spots the anomaly. And so because we have enough trust already in that, part of AI and lives depend on it. Ethically, I don't see a big jump to what you and I are talking about.

And especially when you talk to as you have the end state, which is humans actually are far more prone to error and our old what methodology for targeting was deeply flawed from it, you know, it was from a pragmatic as well as an ethical standpoint. It's a policy. Policy is the biggest limitation here. It's policy. And so, you know, we can hold an individual. accountable for a mistake. Who do you hold accountable in this chain of command for the system?

Is it who plugged in the coordinates or the target parameters? I don't know. I don't have the answers to those. But if we're not thinking about that today, which they are, they're talking about it. There's, you know, there's a lot of, you know, white papers on this and think tanks to talk about it. But I think we're going to be there. And I'm not trying to be the doomserv or, but I think we're going to be there faster than we realize. But one example I'd like to bring up, though, is, you know, in the GWAT days, and those days are gone, you know, so we'll romance over the GWatt days, but the term in your callout, which is a lot of people that you guys have talked to, talk to you, talk to you about callouts, call us where, hey, we're going to come out to

set containment on a building, and we're going to basically give them the opportunity to give themselves up and come to us peacefully, hands up, turn around, we'll search them. And then if they, this escalation of force from a callout goes to the point where we destroy your entire house and kill everyone in it, right? And so, but we're okay with that policy, but we're not okay with saying like Yemen, for example, on the coastline of Yemen. If the Houthis control it, you know, we do a leaflet job and say, hey, guys, listen, civilians, we are going to destroy everything here. You know, so if you live here, it's time to move. We're going to destroy everything that moves here in the next, you know, month and start creating these, you know, areas that we basically set the conditions.

We're doing the call out now and we will escalate for us. But that hooty situation in Yemen is so solvable to me. And I see a strike every couple weeks where they're striking like these urban areas. But these guys are launching them from the coast. And I get it. I'm not in the military anymore. So I'm an armature quarterback. But it doesn't make sense to me.

I'm like, you know where they're launching it from. And the second they launch them, there should be a counter battery going out there and shooting those guys. Can you talk about that a little bit more, chat? Because I think that's, you know, for what it's worth, I think you're right on time. I'll get there, but I'd like you to, you know, go into a little more detail on that. Hurden who these? Yeah.

I mean, you know, I mean, just using the type of solution, you know, the type of solution that you're talking about, which is partly a process, but partly it's linked to emerging technology, right? And that we are not, we're still going after this problem in the same way we did all the way through G-WAT. Yeah. It could be because they're trying to get rid of the, hopefully they're trying to get rid of the stockpiles, but launching tomahawks for one person is not a great return on investment.

But we've been doing that for so long. We're so accustomed to it. I remember years ago in Iraq, they ran out of hellfires because they shot so many. And they're not cheap. And so I think that, again, I'm not saying that low-cost systems like what we're building are the answer for everything. They're not. There has to be a quiver, right?

It's super cheap, $1,000 FPBs. That's one thing. That's something that somebody could modify. and go strike and use for whatever you're going to do before it. And then you go a bigger group two. And that's why we have these groups, right? Group three, four or five. Group five is, you know, now we're getting to kind of more, their higher costs.

You know, the Air Force will cause them intradable because they're sub 20 million potentially. And then you go into man solutions. So it's this escalation of force, right? And escalation of capability we're talking about. And expense and resource. Yeah. But what we're used to doing is, you know, it's like, well, we'll just drop. We go high end right away.

Yeah. But I mean, to your point, going back to your solution for Yemen, yeah, I mean, you, you know, ideally you'd saturate that area with cheap reconnaissance drones. Yes. And you would link that to the ability to launch and deliver loitering munitions via FBVs in a short period of time. So maybe you would need a team of Vindig or, you know, or S-Soft fairly close, but probably not. And it's a very simple solution to you point out. You can buy a group two UAS from us. So let's say our prop version.

So our ISR vision, and we're talking 12 to 14 hours of duration, right, and fly this along the coast. And if every single one of them crashed into the ocean after every sortie and you never recovered a single one, you'd still spend less money than flying a manned asset one time. Okay. That's the differentiator we're talking about here.

And that is possible. It's not just us with lots of companies that can provide this, but when we fly the coast, those systems can be dual use. They can be spotters. They notice, hey, this is, you know, that our sensor seeker picks up this and we go strike it. And so it doesn't have to be Arbor.

It could be a family system. And so then you go into this network collaborative weapons kind of concept that the Air Force wants for their weapons. They want them to communicate. Well, the UAS should communicate. But the problem is they don't yet. And so with our family assistance, we want them all to kind of be in the sensor mesh, right?

And there's a term called JADC2. And JADC2 is this joint, all they're being command of control. And it's this, you know, we're building these cops, these common operating pictures across the world through sensors that are communicating, you know, across the globe, right? Typically, that's been, we need an MQ9 on station or we need an exquisite Manda asset. Yeah, just real quick.

MQ9 is, um, it is the, it's the Reaper, right? Yeah, sorry, I'm always getting the MQ1 in the night. So the MQ9 is a high end platform. almost about $30 million, I believe, and it's typically what the United States relies on. But we don't have a huge number. And stockpile, Chad, you've probably got updated numbers, but it's in the hundreds, you know, and yet it's something that it's a great example of a U.S. approach to drone warfare, which, as Chad is arguing, is outdated.

And so on the MQ9 thread, MQ9s are taking and beaten over Yemen, lately if you guys seen the news. But here's what I'd offer. Instead of just pointing the finger, I'd say, what I'd love to see the MQ9 is carrying 16 of our group to lethal systems. And we launch those from tubes off the MQ9. And then we protect the MQ9. And we kill everything that shoots at the MQ9.

And we started putting countermeasures on this thing to make it more capable, more lethal. And we test it in Yemen. We test it in CENTCOM, right? We get the reps. And then we make this thing durable enough. to be a workforce, you know, within the great power kind of continuum. And when we talk great power competition, I know we're not there yet, but in this conversation,

but like we're going to need a lot of systems because the attribute or the attributability of these systems is going to be enormous. We're going to lose our inventory. But I think we can win. I think we can win against anyone on the planet Earth with the right mindset and the right preparation for it. And so that's, you know, that's moving the ship slowly, right? And that takes time.

But they're doing it. Yeah, it's interesting what you said, Chad, about that being maybe a critical mass now of kind of drone disciple or drone advocates, right, within the military at all levels that perhaps definitely were not there a decade ago, you know, that. I wasn't one of them. I was a critic of them. Yeah. Yeah, that may be changing the culture for the better. Let's say really, you know, really an interesting point. But you know, the reason I was a critic of the systems during my time in service was because I was completely spoiled.

And we wouldn't leave our MSS or, you know, our FOB without AC130. It was meant for us. And so I was spoiled. And whenever we got into a tick, we always had the best assets to destroy the enemy. And so, you know, when we talk about like, you know, conventional force by soft, conventional force had to slug it out, right? They actually had to fight through their objectives where we're like, well, we'll just pull back and drop it.

But if I was a conventional guy looking for resources, then UAS is literally a force multiplier, even to have, even if it wasn't lethal, even if you can tell me where the enemy's at, and then we can put indirect fires on target or even artillery. now you're talking about a game changer for everybody. And that's why it has to remain low cost, in my opinion, within reason, right? You still have to make money as a company. But if you can make it accessible to all these line units, now you basically, soft doesn't have a competitive advantage in this fight.

Now it's across the force. And candidly, I think what you're going to see is conventional forces. You're going to see, you know, some, you know, badass kid in the 80-second airborne is going to figure out how to employ these things in a different way. And he's going to change the game because he has access to technology he didn't have before and because it's cheap enough for him to break. And so that's what I want to see. Similar to what happened in Ukraine, I mean, at the beginning of the war,

it was kind of still the 10-kilometer line, right? So what I meant by me and by that is your infantry squad did not have the ability to affect anything beyond 10 kilometers other than with non-organic assets to, you know, So I'm talking about reconnaissance and strike beyond 10 kilometers. They had to rely on a single radio net. And as you know, it was a bottleneck for, you know, in every military to include the U.S. military. But increasingly now with FPVs, with drone units being pushed down below the brigade level, you've got more of this network that you're talking about, right?

You've got a squad. The FPV dudes are more important than the machine gunners. Right? You know, machine gunners are now like local security guy, the automatic weapons company, the FBV guys are the, and the drone guys are that squad's ability to, to reach out. And so let me, let me offer you a solution. Everybody listening. And so our jet, our group two, which is 55 pound takeoff gross weight, can go between 100 and 150 miles, okay? Okay. Can you just tell us what group two is real quick? So they have groups or categories, or weight-based. And so group ones are kind of like the smaller systems, FPV drones, the smaller systems, right? There are some fixed wing drones in the group one category. But group two is really kind of where you start seeing the loitering munitions or the explosive systems. They're about 50 pounds.

Usually they can be tube launch, ground launch, catapult launch. They're bigger. And then just gets bigger and bigger from there. And group five is like a reaper, right? So MQ9, the bigger systems. So the trade space I'm talking about is in group two space. And just let me give you a hypothetical. and something we're building.

If our bird can fly 100 miles and it can get past all the enemy air defenses, how low it's flying or how high it's flying. And under wing, it's carrying two FPV drones. And you just described a 10 kilometer kind of bubble that was your limit of advance or capability. What if I can put those FPB drones

100 miles in, I can deploy them at an altitude and they fly down to target. And now that bird, that group two bird, which is our tempest bird, now the relay for the FPV guys to fly their two drones in, you have now changed, you have changed the script operationally. And so we're building that. No need to deploy soft teams to.

Yeah, do it out of another. Yeah. Exactly. Not even, I mean, not even not for terminal control enough for anything. Yeah. It's going to change. I hope that, you know, soldiers aren't dying unnecessarily. Technology should be filling a big gap for them.

And we should see less loss of life on our side. Inshallah. But you know, I think everything you've said makes me more optimistic. We were slow to make the culture change to, in many ways early on. I mean, remember, I'll give you an example from an infantryman's perspective, okay? I went, you know, in the Battle of Fallujah, now looking back, I'm thinking, in 2004, why the fuck were we sending guys through the door every time? You know, of course, because it's the Marine Corps,

and we didn't even have enough grenades to roll in first. Yeah, but that's an inadequate answer. The point is there should have been a better way in 2004, because once we entered that house, we were on equal terms with our enemy. In fact, he had an advantage, and it didn't matter what technology we had behind us. And, you know, I can't help thinking. We lost a lot of guys that just, you know, who didn't need to die.

I mean, I'm not getting a motion. My brother was a Marine in Fallujah in 2004. He fought door to door in what you're describing. And, you know, he lost, you know, he was a platoon leader. He lost quite a few guys in Fulia. And so, yeah, this is near and dear to all of our hearts that served. And Andy, to your point, man, like, when you get emotional about this, it's the same way I do as a former operator.

Like, this isn't a get rich, quick scheme to build drones. This is literally we're going to change the way we fight. And I believe that with all of my being is that. these systems, if we can remain a low cost price point and everybody can have them in their hands, it doesn't have to have our sticker on it. Force other industries to do the same thing. And then we have solutions for our guys in the ground that deserve these systems. And, you know, it's not altruistic, right?

I'm not, this isn't a nonprofit. But what we can do is we can drive a market a direction and change expectations of the DOD for the positive for everybody. It doesn't have to just be for soft peculiar or the budgets that can execute things very quickly at lower scale. This has to be something we can proliferate across the forces, man. Yeah, given, yeah, absolutely given the right emphasis on, you know, on the topic of culture, actually not, just on the topic of drones generally.

So we've talked about near pair, the role of drones in near pair competition. Before we ship, because I want to talk to about drones in soft's role, you know, as like the need for a blue like a blue color drone that we can use within Dage and leave behind blah blah blah yeah you know but but um armed overwatch or all that shit um

but you know before we do so I'd just like to hear your comments about um really being prepared for near peer warfare and and and uh you know what what does have to change I'm contributing more with the company that we started Firestorm, which I haven't even mentioned once in this call.

I'm contributing more on this side of the fence than I ever did in uniform. And I know that emphatically. And it's not to discredit my service or things I did. I did some great stuff. But now I'm able to do the things that I wanted to do in service, but I didn't have the money, resources. I didn't have the Wasta as a leader to say, hey, this is where we should be going. I don't listen to me. And it's soft.

You know, everyone thinks you're important. Actually not. So once I had that epiphany, I came on the other side. Yeah, yeah. Here's how I'll tell you I'm going to address that, Andy, is that. So I talked to you guys at the drone, we're building. We're 3D printing it. And I said we can print it anywhere in the world.

What I failed to mention was our other product is manufacturing. So we have a product that is manufacturing. And what that allows us to do is put a manufacturing. line in a ConX box and ship it anywhere in the world and start a drone factory, right? And what we're doing there is we're redefining what the term attributable is, right? And so in the media, if you looked it up and Google it right now, you'd see a really wide scale of what a tritability is. It could be a price point, right?

It could be, hey, if it's $100,000, it's treatable. Okay, cool. Put that down on my category of a treatable. but truly if you have two systems, Andy, and you're in a Pacific Island chain and you're with your team, those are exquisite assets if you don't get more, right? So if I tell you, Andy, you're not getting any more resupply.

They're like, holy crap, I got two systems. How am I going to use them? You're not going to use them, you know, kind of in the context of a affordable mass. They become this thing that you're going to wait for the right shot. And so a true ability to me, a price is important, but sustainability is more important and the ability to produce at the edge. And so what we've created is this manufacturing concept that we can plop down in, you know, in Indo-PACOM and start producing.

And you made a comment earlier about partner forces. So what I would like to see is these capable workforces within these countries because there's tons of engineers in these countries. They're doing the quality control. They're building our systems for whatever user it is. And then when the soft guys go out there and do a j-a-jave. set or whatever military exercise they're doing, they happen to provide you now a manufacturing capability to produce your own drone in a box. And now we are basically creating resources

within theaters, manufacturing resources that we can turn on as conflict requires. And so to me, as a former military guy, if I can provide that to DOD, I have done more for my country to change the odds in their favor than I ever did like running around with a medirox. and dragging someone to have a building in a gunfight. I'm talking about potentially, you know, changing the way we fight, like I said, the beginning.

Yeah, so, Chad, I think a really good illustration of that is, is in Somalia, for instance, but you could name, you know, name African country, but Africa is a great place to look at it.

Yeah. So, you know, whenever it was, 2017, the decision was made to kind of disengage. I know it was later. I can't remember when it was from the, it was later.

It was much later than that. It was around COVID timeframe. And so we did. You know, we pulled out basically from providing me, not completely. We maintained a task force in Mogad issue, but we were no longer doing the advise and assist with the Dunab directly. And of course, there was a huge fall off, I think, and probably in capability. But the biggest concern at the time was our ability to support, continue supporting them. with fires in collective self-defense, you know, both from a policy perspective, right?

Because we no longer had guys with them. Absolutely. But mostly just from a practical perspective of just, you know, really a target identification. As you know, it can never be as sure as when you have a guy co-located with Pondent Nation Force, right? So now you're talking about problems and being able to support. them and then allocation of assets, prioritization, because you don't have U.S. forces involved. You're not going to get a high-end asset, right, to support the Donop. And now there's a black hole. As far as they're concerned, one day, they're having U.S. support. And for the next day,

for no reason they can understand, they're not, and they're getting killed, right? And the Americans are behind a compound saying, hey, you know, we're behind you, right? That's what I, so this, as you point out there are so many things involved in this that technology can solve and change fundamentally about how some of the ways that we wage more. Now, the solution, and I'm not knocking anyone because I was part, I've written about this and in a positive way, but the solution was to go to something called Armed Overwatch, right? Which came down to a man platform, of course, Air Force, right? at the time. And yet, what you've just talked about gives you armed over watch at a fraction of the cost,

none of the political commitment and none of the risks. Yeah. Yeah. And here's a couple, you know, vignettes I'll say without disclosing anything classified, is that a lot of times we don't have the authorities to strike bad guys that we know where they're at. We have pattern of life. We have high confidence. We know they're driving pointing at point B.

We are simply not allowed to strike them. And without getting into the full authorities of how they're at, process goes, the country team has the final say. So the ambassador gets to determine whether you're going to strike in a country like that, right? And if the ambassador doesn't want to have the political ramifications or not getting invited to cocktail parties, he's probably going to say no. Okay. And so, yes, so we watch these bad guys in all these countries. Well, here's what I'd offer you. I always love the concept of providing target debt to other folks legally and let them do it and let them do clean up their own messes.

But what you just described is a perfect example. And Africa is right for this. Take Molly, for example, right? Molly is a dumpster fire right now. And if you can enable them with lethal systems, and how about this, you add a command and control link so you have final approval, right? So now you can still do partner force and advise insists, but you're basically determining, you know, lethal action if you want to babysit or you can let them go

crazy and say, take all the lethal crap you want, you bought them, go execute. And I think that Africa is a perfect example of that because, and specifically Molly, we used to fly aircraft, you know, from the med down there and we'd waste, you waste freaking six to eight hours of transit time just to get there and you get two hours of station time and you're not accomplished anything. So how about this? ISR drones are flying over the city and I get a, you create a surveillance state in these countries which I have issue with, but you know most of the world is the surveillance

state right now. I know. I know. I mean, U.S. is an oasis of non-surveillance that most of the country Luddites, you know. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, I guess it just enables different options.

You know? Say again, Andy? We're still trying to identify murderers by means other than CCTV. You know, all across Europe. it's like okay where did it occur all right show me to show me the tv with us we have to call in fucking you know not miami vice it's i and they go for or you have to go to like the neighbor's house and ask for their surveillance sorry i got us off on this tension yeah no i love it let's go

let's talk about ring camera yeah yeah all right man hey chat um what what have we not i know we're coming up on our time what what uh haven't we spoken about out that we should have? I don't know. I mean, I think this is a conversation that's going to continue to evolve. I don't, there are some experts in the field. I think a lot of them come out of Ukraine. They're the drone operator of Ukraine right now.

I think that the US DOD needs to be listening. They need to ask any right questions. And then demanding industry adapts to those requirements. I also think that, you know, policy, when you talk about, you know, compliance of non-Chinese parts, it's really hard to, you know, create enough supply chain in the United States to fulfill the appetite of some of the technologies that are out there, specifically in chips. You know, we need Taiwan. Taiwan is strategic for a number of reasons, but mostly because the semiconductors and things.

But yeah, so we're at the mercy of kind of a global supply network. And it's a dangerous position to be in. And it makes us, it's going to force our hand into conflict. And so the United States has to become more self-deficient, specifically on a manufacturing of chips, which they're doing. They've invested a ton of money. I think Arizona has one of those and I think Ford has one as well. But that's, you know, those are the things that I think about camera systems, you know, just to not get on too many tangents, but camera systems are extremely expensive. They're cost prohibitive.

And so we need more U.S. companies to stand up and start building components. They're going to go into drones to keep them low cost. And software, you know, proliferation, keeping things open systems, open source, allowing, you know, folks to iterate on these things in the field is where we need to be. And so, you know, I think that it's not all doom and gloom. The United States is making some really good choices. We've got some scar tissue and we have some bureaucrats that make things difficult. but I think that there is a new regime.

I know there's a new regime within the tech industry of former military guys that know what the hell to build. I know that for a fact, because I talk to them all the time. But I would also say that decision makers and those senior GS-14s and 15s are now coming out of the residual conflict we've had for 20 years. And so they have context.

And hopefully they're making decisions. They're not your grandfather's GS-14s and 15. right. There's great people in these positions now. There's people that are trying to change it for the better. And so I'm optimistic. I'm going to bring more solutions than complaints. And so that's my goal. Chad, we're going to bring you on again.

This is great. This is an evolving, fascinating topic, needless to say, thank you so much. We're going to talk about theology next or spirituality for next hour. We're open to it all, man. And actually, we are broadening our. fan base. So those are great, great on that's a very small leap

from autonomous systems to spirituality. That's true. It's certainly linked. Okay. A couple things. Yeah, over to you, man. Ask keeping. Check out Chad,

Firestorm Labs. They're doing incredible stuff. Check out Andy. Also, check out, website is launchfirestorm.com. Launchfirestorm.com. It'll be in the description and in the show notes. Andy, of course, all the links to Andy will be in the show notes, our Patreon in the show notes.

Not me necessarily, but my book. Yes, exactly. And also, I lost my train of thought. Thank you, Andy. Oh, Chad's episode with us on the Team House will also be in the description if you want to check out and hear about Chad's career. He's going to come on the show again. We're going to get him in New York and lick her him up again. You can even leave mean comments on the YouTube video about me.

Yeah, we love that. Yeah, I mean, just very quickly, a plug for that video. So, you know, J-Soc's kind of ad-sock component, I'm using the wrong term here, is 24 Special Tactics Squadron. And Chad spent most of his career with that squadron and has some really fascinating insights from everything from, you know, initial selection all the way through to how that squadron operates and evolves. what is a PJ, you know, what is a combat controller, what is a TechP? When what did they become during GWAT and what do they need to be going ahead, you know, all of this tied in with more war stories than, you know, I'm trying to think of an analogy involving D but I can't think of one.

We'll allow us to advertise on YouTube. Honestly, I could see the parallels to what you're doing now, Chad, because, you know, my understanding, like my, the 24th STS is, like, like the Swiss Army knife of J-Soc. You guys can do it all. And not just you're here. I'm not just pumping your tires. Like you guys are probably, in my opinion.

I keep it coming. I like it. The more impressive ones. I mean, everyone's impressive in J-Soc, obviously, but you guys do it all. You can adapt. And I think what you're doing now is kind of like, it makes sense.

It lends itself to what you're trying to do now. Yeah, I appreciate that, man. Yeah, super capable guy, super smart. Yeah, man, appreciate it. And we got a quote from D. once impressive about J-Soc. Just ask them. Yeah, they'll tell you. Lessons play, yeah.

All right. Thanks, guys. Great having you, Chad. Deep, thank you so much for putting this on.