Nathan Mintz on CX2's Spectrum Imperative: electromagnetic warfare is the new contested domain

tell you about profound. Get your brand mentioned in chat GBT. reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. And we have Nathan Mintz from CX2 in the TBP and Ultradome. Nathan, how you doing? Boom. Wonderful. Wonderful.

It's uh sunny and about 75 degrees outside here in East Elsagundo and uh great. Haven't uh yeah, it's been too long since we up. There's nothing like pulling open the weather app in California and it's just 10 days straight of sunny and 75 and we're lucky to have that pretty much year round.

I like all the taxes tolerable. I like all the all the traditional press prints behind you. Uh we need to send you some physical uh memorabilia screenshots from your from your TV appearances since this is your second one. Um but give us the give us the update. What what's new in your world? Yeah.

So, you know, CX2, we've been turning and burning. Uh, we pretty much been racking up the frequent flyer miles, going to multiple exercises this year. I think we're [clears throat] about to go to number eight next week.

Um, and one of the things we realized as we go around, we talk to leaders and we talk to uh the war fighters and stuff is that there's kind of a a nebulous understanding of the nature of the problem that we're facing. So, we decided to get together with uh some of the most knowledgeable war fighters we know.

uh along with our experts here and you know really write it down in in booklet form as the spectrum imperative and if you go to our website cx2. com there's a big banner or you can try and type in spectrumimpmperative. com I'm not the best speller so I would just go to the our website and then go from there.

Uh but really what we're trying to do is come up with what is the core thesis of electromagnetic warfare in the 21st century because the the electromagnetic spectrum is this cross domain across the entire uh all the other domains of warfare land sea space air and and cyber that connects all of them and particularly as everything moves to more autonomous systems uh we are seeing more and increasing reliance upon on the spectrum uh and it becomes a more contested domain of warfare which because we had the luxury of working for 20 years during the you know global war on terror Iraq etc where we had permissive access to this spectrum and air superiority we never had to worry about it before and now it's something that as we're seeing every day in Ukraine when it's heavily contested our ability to have air superiority air dominance or really to maneuver on other uh in other domains is severely impeded by it.

Can you help me can you help me synthesize uh Palmer Ly's latest sound bite around uh America as the world's arms dealer as opposed to the America the world police. This idea that uh American defense technology companies will be building products that America basically sells or deploys to other countries.

like what does that look like in Ukraine for you in Taiwan in the Middle East? Um how is that different than uh America, the World Police where you're designing a system that's ultimately used by American boots on the ground? So uh in traditional defense, I spent 14 years in traditional defense. Yeah.

I think I pulled my passport out of my drawer three times and one of them was for one time was for my honeymoon, right? versus in the last five years that I've been involved with new defense, I think I've been abroad six or seven times. Right? So, that kind of gives you an idea.

Actually, the last year, I think I've been abroad four or five times. So, where we're going, you know, now it's much more common for us to go visit the war fighter up in the battlefield and understand their situation and try and figure out how we can adapt what we're building to go along with them.

And I think that's what Porter what Palmer's referring to is how do we, you know, work alongside our allies. This is actually one of our uh one of our talking points within the within the spectrum imperative is that we need to be more integrated with our allies from a spectrum standpoint.

We have to be compatible with their radio systems, compatible with their sensor systems, compatible with their command and control systems, and that's a huge part of the spectrum imperative. So, um I think I think that's what Palmer's really referring to is how do we get them Yeah.

to to work with us to buy what the gaps in their capabilities or build them indigenously. You know, there's a lot of talk about factories at the edge or, you know, forwardleaning supply chains to deal with contested logistics. Y that's kind of the I think the direction where Palmer's going.

I What is the latest update on what's going on in Ukraine? It feels like it's fast becoming a forever war. Unfortunately, at the same time, I've been hearing um new updates on drones with fiber optic cables to avoid, you know, uh the the problems of uh electronic and magnetic warfare, right?

Uh like what's what like what's the state of the the the conflict and then uh what's actually on the cutting edge of what the various militaries are using? Yeah.

So Ukraine uh what's basically happened is the front lines have been relatively frozen and it's because if you think about it you need to have you know uncontested data link uh you know data links at the spectrum layer you need uncontested navigation etc or else you're kind of swimming upstream.

So effectively they've created this, you know, no man's land of electronic concertina wire in minefields that really impedes any forward motion. And 98% of the action is occurring with autonomous systems, whether that's drones or unmanned ground vehicles or uh unmanned surface vessels.

Uh the Ukrainians have actually been probably the most successful with the USVs in the Black Sea. They've pretty much pushed the Russians completely out of Sebastapole. Yeah.

uh completely out of Crimea and now they have to go all the way to their ports on the eastern uh side of the uh the the Black Sea to actually like you know keep their ships safe, right? So that's a case study where autonomous systems or actually automated systems in this case because it's still human-driven. Yeah.

Have been able to really make a a difference in that conflict.

Meanwhile, the whole concept of a forward line of advance or forward edge of the battle area is now completely obsolete in the sense that you can have drones pop up from many kilometers behind the lines and hit strategic targets, which is specifically what we saw with Operation Spiderweb. Yeah.

Now, you mentioned tethered drones. Those were very popular in the Kursk offensive. Actually, the Russians were the first to introduce them and the Ukrainians then followed suit. And the whole idea was that well if there's nothing to jam then you can fight through all the jamming.

The trouble is is that the the the tether drones in some cases within the Kurts offensive actually turn into about 30% of the drones being used at any given time at its peak. But it has it's a brittle solution. If you go around a tree you can snag it. Yeah. Uh if you know uh the lines can be cut quite easily.

Um you know there's all sorts of limitations. And then not not to mention overwater, it's like running a fishing line. If it touches the water at all, it's going to weigh down the drone and take it down with it. So, I hadn't thought about that. Yeah. So, tethered drones like have their time in place.

It's a little unclear how uh applicable they will be in uh in in like the Pacific for example. Uh, but you know, for things like persistent surveillance where you're putting a drone up in the air, uh, and you know, you can actually run power up to it for surveillance, it may make a lot of sense, right?

I hadn't even thought about that. That's super interesting. Yeah, but it's Maslo's hammer. Yeah. Yeah. There there is no silver bullet. There is no What was the phrase you used? You said Maslo's hammer. Yeah. Maslo's hammer. That if I have a a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Oh, sure.

And so that's what tends to happen with any s sort of new countermeasures. It's first involved and then the enemy saturates and counters it. In fact, probably the biggest paradigm shift we've seen in the Ukraine war that will be very applicable in the Pacific is this idea that all of our systems are highly adaptable.

That both us and the enemy are operating on a much faster uh fly fix loop and countermeasure loop than what we're used to seeing. We're used to seeing years for new systems to be introduced.

we'll be looking at more like weeks or possibly even days in some cases and augmented by commercial software practices like CI/CD and other things update. Uh sorry we have to move on so quickly but thank you for the update and uh congratulations on the on all the progress.

Uh definitely encourage everyone to go check out the spectrum imperative campaign from CX2. Uh and we will talk to you soon. Yeah, great to catch up Nathan. We'll talk to you soon. Bye. Uh before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about linear. Linear is a