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

how you doing hey good John good good to be here with you I was listening in and I'm I'm bummed that I don't have as good a hair as Zachary or around he has fantastic hair uh you know we get some compliments on our hair every once in a while but he blew us out of the water I think uh so you know the fans are just going to flock over to the Plaid now yeah but but yeah how you doing and can you give us a little intro on yourself and some background and what you're building now um I'm doing great actually yeah so uh you know right now uh it's sunny and 72 degrees outside in uh in elag gundo and uh um you know it's it's it's a great day to be in defense uh we're seeing just uh you know it seems like every hearing that I watch of these appointees for this new Administration uh seem to be echoing our talking points so it's kind of nice to know that uh uh the last few years of of pushing for a transformation in in the way we do our Force mix and and how we fight Wars is actually uh someone's actually been listening um so as you know I've been in defense for about 20 years I started out uh at the big uh Soviet tractor Factory primes uh I spent 14 years at boing and rathon uh as a radar systems engineer electronic warfare uh engineer I worked on you know programs with names like next Generation Jammer and uh uh the radar for the F-15 and the F-18 and a bunch of space programs and stuff uh and then in about 2018 an old friend from college uh Joe lale called me up and said hey we're starting a defense vertical do you have any ideas uh and I came to him a couple months later for with the idea for what turned into epis which is a high power microwave to kill drones and other electronics uh so got that started ran that for a couple of years uh then moved over into the automotive radar space started a company called Spartan radar uh that does uh you know software that makes Automotive Radars have higher resolution uh that one we ended up selling to a uh a major equipment OEM uh in the past year uh and so we've we've exited that one at this point uh and then about a year ago I got together with uh uh my co-founders mark tregar Porter Smith and Lee Thompson and we started CX2 with the goal of transforming the way that the US uh fights Warfare in the electronic warfare domain so uh that's where we are today the company's about 24 people we're here in uh based here in El Segundo uh we're backed by hvc and Andre horowits uh and right now the office is pretty empty today because most of my team's out uh participating in an exercise so uh exciting times abound yeah um you know you see those viral videos of the Chinese drone displays where it looks like a dragon and everyone immediately quotes it and says like that's a weapon system at the same time as scary as that is it feels like between epis and andal and you know Allen Control Systems is just pelting bullets and we're talking to a company today that's building laser weapons to take down drones there's a lot of different companies that have addressed this is it as dangerous as we think or is it more of a solved problem maybe that we already know or is it just like we need to scale up the systems we have so I'll give you a couple statistics uh when I was over in Kow at the NATO innov Summit last year uh the ukrainians thre out a statistic that 30% of the uh of the casualties that they were experiencing were due to drone strikes wow I think today in the kers offensive for the Russians it's the majority if not almost all of them for certainly for the tanks and vehicles so it's become uh a main stay of modern warfare and right now that's where we are today is just the beginning most of the systems that we see used it's these f PV first person view with some guy sitting there with goggles like he's playing a video game and it's very One V one well in the next few years it's going to become one V many yeah and at that point those command and data links that today are essential for that drone to get there and we're figuring out how to make them work more autonomously because there's all these countermeasures like you mentioned to try and jam that data link or deny it uh it's going to become even more vital because uh one one person suddenly that Archer is going to be firing 100 arrows right uh we're kind of St taking a step past that at CX2 and we're trying to develop the systems that shoot the Archer not the arrow with that in mind uh and a lot of it comes down to finding the Drone controller uh which becomes an increasingly harder problem is the cat and mouse game continues uh in Modern Warfare so what uh what does the device look like that sending out the signal to find the Drone operator are you putting up your own drone or is this something that can be from satellites or uavs or any sorts of other devices or can you even talk about it yeah so we're building our own uh uh electronic warfare stack uh to find fix and finish on those emitters of interest and that starts with a a drone that does uh Sig and uh finds and fixes on those signals we call it wraith it's a it's a group two drone uh with about you know 45 minutes a loer time or 40 kilm of range depending on how you think about it that takes off and geocat those emitters and by that I mean it finds the position of those emitters it's a little different from systems on the ground today that mostly kind of give you a line of bearing and say it's out there we'll actually give you a fix on it and identify what it is from there through our Nexus operating system uh we'll hand off to an attack drone called Banshee that'll go out it's a loitering munition with a home on omitter Seeker that'll go out and take that emitter out so you go find the controller and then you you have another uh drone that follows it and and actually takes it out kinetically right so that's that's the Cur the the uh the full when I talk about the full attack stack that we're building right um and uh alongside that we've actually built an fpv kit with a version of the Banshee Seeker that can snap onto another drone we call it vadas uh that will actually go out and seek uh that emitter out and it provides an overlay so the fpv user sees a line of bearing and kind of the strength of signal and you know you're getting warmer you're getting colder no no no fly left fly right and can home in on the particular signal so that's kind of our product mix wraith Banshee vadas Nexus uh you're kind of seeing a Halo theme in here yeah I like it very cool you have a question or I I have another one I can yeah I as you're talking it feels like there's some there's plenty of you know companies in in the gundo and just defense Tech broadly that can just sort of like think longterm about capabilities and trying to win these bigger programs it feels like you have to take a much more iterative approach because things are kind of evolving in real time and potentially that's like the the going to be the case for the entire life cycle of the company right where you're just always trying to stay um always trying to stay whatever a step ahead of adversaries is that different than you think working at you said Boeing and Ron back in the day uh where they're just sort of thinking in sort of big programs and big capabilities and and you're now having to be like nimble and and constantly trying to stay at the edge yes absolutely the way that we used to do product development in Aerospace was very much a bell curve with a long tale of sustainment right so pretty much all the effort would culminate around critical designer review and then at that point most of the systems engineers and stuff would roll off and program would go into manufacturing sustainment whereas if you look at soft products if I was to look at how Facebook does a roll out or you know Google or any of these others for instance uh it's much more of kind of a a logarithmic Plateau it gets up to a certain point there might be a little bit of a hump and effort once the the the posts are kind of put in on the house so to speak and at that point there's a software sustainment tail that's much more much larger that takes place over time and that's what we see in Ukraine with like the Drone manufacturers that are over there there's like 200 drone companies in ukra that are out uh building the million or so drones that they're putting to use you know right now um what what they're able to do I is that they're able to rapidly iterate using commercial you know cicd commercial was it constant integration constant delivery type of processes um the the most extreme report I've heard of this is they they had cases where the Russians were rapidly changing tactics and employing new systems where they were updating software at a rate of six times a day and like with with the systems I used to work on I mean the missiles would get software updates so infrequently they called them tape updates because they had to man to go out there yeah and so you know they were lucky if they had an update every two years much less you know six times a day um so the way that we do s uh software acquisition in the dod has to fundamentally change uh there's been some good signs in that respect with uh the rules that the SE def has pushed out for software acquisition p way where they're saying we really need to buy software using commercial processes as a default as opposed to still using the traditional waterfall you know I call it the Soviet tractor Factory way of of procuring things right um and and you know I think on the hardware side we eventually need to move that direction as well it's a little harder when you're building a multi-billion dollar aircraft I mean just realistically that is building a drone but let's start with software and iron that out because that's where the most palpable Need Is Right I love I love all those phrases they're they're going to stay in my mind forever uh can you can you break us down uh can you break it down for us about DJI uh there's a lot of fear that we're never going to catch up there's also just a general fear of like are all the DJI drones going to rise up one day and attack us uh uh you've probably seen like the internals of these drones you know how to probably take them over at the drop of a hat you can probably do it on your phone if you wanted to uh how much of a risk is DJI uh we've had other guests on the show say maybe we should ban the importation entirely where do you stand on DJI I mean you know we already have export or import controls in place and like they're banned from use from US government agencies for example with with exceptions y um the solution is we got to build our own drone uh you know industry here in the states I think we're doing a good job in that the uh CX2 is part of that but we're also partnering with Ukrainian drone firms I don't know if you saw there was a big piece in the Wall Street Journal talking about and and Skyfall which is a Ukrainian drone firm and so like partnering with the guys that are already building a million drones uh a year overseas and try to take their lessons learned and scale it over here is one sheet code that we can apply uh to catch up faster right um the the big advantage that the Chinese have is they applied consumer scale Technology and Manufacturing to the Drone problem and they took advantage of our own regulatory uh you know blockers that we were putting in place I don't know if you're aware of this but to fly a drone in the US you had to have a I think it's a FAA type 109 license yeah is what it's called and the Chinese got around that by labeling what they were doing a toy so anytime that the US drone manufacturers you know we've been building fpv drones since 2005 2006 but nobody could get funding to actually scale it because of these regulations and the fact that oh it's too hard to train the pilots it's not scalable the Chinese on the other hand found the loophole and they scaled up as a result right so our own barriers from our own regulatory infrastructure what need to be Revisited and that'll unle us Innovation and allow us to to compete with them toe-to-toe got it are there any considerations for uh Indo payom versus what's going on in uh Eastern Europe clearly you're very focused on Ukraine but are you looking ahead to any other theaters yes I mean in Indo pcon the ranges are just a lot larger so you're going to have bigger drones with uh you know larger scale right that's the main difference um also the Chinese are just more likely to uh to bring out you know more sophisticated systems I mean you know the Russians for all the talk about you know the zoo 57 Fel in the reality of it is is they filled it all of 12 of them the Chinese j2s and J 31s are starting to get into the hundreds that's their quote unquote fifth generation stealth fighter uh I can make an argument that it's not quite fifth generation but anyway um and then and then just their the amount of drones that they're talking about bring it scale they they recently disclosed that they have an order for a million kamakazi drones that they're putting forward right in Indo paycom right now our plan is to deploy a whole bunch of Legacy Battle Star Galactica assets with names like rivet joint Compass call that are mostly on older aircraft some are on 707s some are moving into GF stream fivs to do a lot of these capabilities and they're going to be pushed way back from the Taiwan straight the only thing we have that can really get close is The Growler and all of our missiles that we're using to do this Mission cost millions of dollars that's what we're seeing over in you Gulf of Aiden right now you need a $6 million missile take out a $20,000 drone so we're here to help bring the cost parody back well thank you for everything that you're doing we were certainly appreciate and we appreciate you stopping by uh you got to call back in when there's more news more updates uh those are some great we could keep yeah we can keep talking to you for another hour I'm sure we're just going to go into I mean it's the F It's the Most Fascinating geopolitical situations the most fascinating technology and uh yeah we thank you for taking the time to chat with us today and I'm sure we'll have again soon so thank you absolutely happy to be here thanks for having me on have a great day talk soon talk soon uh and we got Brandon from Shield coming in to the studio in just a minute uh I believe he's here let's bring him on in we got one minute if you're not familiar with Shield AI develop test and deploy autonomy faster than ever autonomy for the world another defense tech company and he is here now Brandon welcome to the show what's up guys how you guys