CX2's Nathan Mintz on electronic warfare, finding drone operators, and why DJI's regulatory arbitrage beat the US

Summary

Nathan Mintz, co-founder of CX2, brings 20 years of defense experience — 14 of them at Boeing and Raytheon as a radar and electronic warfare engineer — to a problem that Ukraine has made impossible to ignore: drone operators are now the most valuable target on the battlefield.

At the NATO Innovation Summit in Kraków, Ukrainian officials cited drones as responsible for 30% of their casualties. In the Kursk offensive, Mintz says the figure for Russian tank and vehicle losses is now the majority, if not nearly all. And that's with today's one-to-one FPV model, where a single operator guides a single drone. The shift to one-to-many autonomous swarms will make the controller an even more critical — and harder to find — target.

CX2's answer is an end-to-end electronic warfare stack designed to find the archer, not the arrow.

The product stack

• Wraith — a Group 2 drone with roughly 45 minutes of loiter time or 40 km of range, running signals intelligence to geolocate enemy emitters. Unlike ground-based systems that give a line of bearing, Wraith provides a precise fix and identification.
• Banshee — a loitering munition with a home-on-emitter seeker that hands off from Wraith via the Nexus operating system to take out the located controller kinetically.
• VADAS — an FPV-compatible kit version of the Banshee seeker that snaps onto a third-party drone, giving the pilot a signal-strength overlay to home in on the emitter manually.
• Nexus — the operating system tying the stack together.

The company is 24 people, based in El Segundo, and backed by a16z and HVC. Most of the team was out participating in a field exercise at the time of the conversation.

The DJI gap

The US drone industry was building FPV drones as far back as 2005–2006, but FAA licensing requirements and investor skepticism around pilot scalability kept it from reaching commercial scale. DJI exploited a regulatory loophole by classifying its products as toys, avoided those requirements, and built a consumer-scale manufacturing base that now dominates the market. Import controls are already in place — DJI is banned from US government use with limited exceptions — but Mintz argues the real fix is domestic manufacturing, accelerated by partnering with Ukrainian firms already producing roughly one million drones per year. CX2 is working with Skyfall, a Ukrainian drone company covered in the Wall Street Journal, as part of that effort.

Software velocity as the real edge

The legacy defense model — effort peaks at critical design review, then the program enters sustainment — is structurally incompatible with modern drone warfare. Ukrainian manufacturers have adapted commercial CI/CD practices to push software updates six times a day in response to Russian tactical shifts. Mintz's missile programs at Raytheon updated so rarely that patches were still called "tape updates," deployed every two years by a technician. The DoD's new software acquisition pathway is a step in the right direction, but Mintz argues the hardware procurement model ultimately needs the same overhaul.

Indo-Pacific theater

The geometry of a Taiwan scenario changes the calculus significantly. Ranges are much larger, drones will be bigger, and the adversary is more capable — China has disclosed an order for one million kamikaze drones for the Indo-Pacific. US legacy electronic warfare assets like Rivet Joint and Compass Call, some still flying on 707 airframes, would be pushed well back from the Taiwan Strait. The closest capable platform is the EA-18G Growler. And the cost mismatch that's already visible in the Gulf of Aden — a $6 million missile to destroy a $20,000 drone — is the economic problem CX2 says it exists to solve.