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Best of LinkedIn: Defense Tech CW 24/ 25 · Best of LinkedIn: Digital Transformation & Tech

• 0:00
  Speaker 1:
• 0:24
  Speaker 0: So to jump right in, our mission for this deep dive is Pretty straightforward.
• 0:28
  Speaker 0: We are distilling the absolute most critical defense tech insights we've seen on LinkedIn over the past two calendar weeks,
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: right?
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: And were specifically zeroing in on digital transformation and what it means for defense professionals today.
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: fast paced focused on operational realities definitely no hype
• 0:45
  Speaker 0: Exactly.
• 0:46
  Speaker 0: And just a quick heads-up for you listening out there, we're going to be talking about some intensely politically charged scenarios like the conflict in Ukraine or defense spending debates.
• 1:10
  Speaker 0: most brutal reality check is happening in the air.
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: Oh, absolutely!
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: The counter-UAS problem...
• 1:15
  Speaker 0: Right.
• 1:16
  Speaker 0: Unmanned aerial systems?
• 1:17
  Speaker 0: Cheap drones are just completely upending traditional economics of air defense.
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: Yeah, let's unpack the mechanics of that math because it is wild.
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: Mark CL posted this brilliant analysis about how Russia is fundamentally losing the cost exchange ratio against these cheap Ukrainian drones.
• 1:35
  Speaker 0: The hardware costs are just staggering when you look at them side by side.
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: They really are Russia being forced to use these Soviet-era IGLA missiles To shoot down like off-the-shelf commercial plastic drones And an IGLA costs roughly fifty thousand dollars a pop.
• 1:51
  Speaker 0: And the math actually gets worse.
• 1:52
  Speaker 0: A fifty grand is just for their cheapest legacy interceptor.
• 1:56
  Speaker 0: when they have to deploy newer systems, The financial bleed just accelerates even if you assume a perfect one-to-one intercept ratio which Mark notes as totally contradicted by actual battlefield footage You're still bleeding the adversary's budget dry.
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: and mark pointed out something that should terrify legacy militaries.
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: Ukraine hasn't even hit peak economies of scale yet.
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: They are establishing airspace superiority just by exhausting the enemy's magazines.
• 2:21
  Speaker 0: It is warfare-by-spreadsheet really!
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: Exactly, I mean firing a fifty thousand dollar missile at a cheap drone is like swatting housefly with solid gold
• 2:30
  Speaker 0: bar?
• 2:30
  Speaker 0: That s great way to put it
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: sure you kill fly but if there was swarm of them then go bankrupt before clear your room.
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: So let me ask you Are legacy defense primes building more expensive gold flieswaters?
• 2:45
  Speaker 0: Or
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: is the actual integration changing the math here?
• 2:48
  Speaker 0: Well, the good news is that architecture's finally shifting.
• 2:51
  Speaker 0: Stephanie C Hill recently posted about this major development from Lockheed Martin called sanctum.
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: Okay what makes sanctum different?
• 2:57
  Speaker 0: It's an end-to-end integrated solution.
• 3:00
  Speaker 0: it's not just a kinetic weapon...it acts more like a central nervous system That constantly calculates The most cost effective way to neutralize a threat.
• 3:08
  Speaker 1: Oh wow and we actually saw the physical application of that Just days ago.
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: right
• 3:12
  Speaker 0: We did.
• 3:12
  Speaker 0: yeah Tim Cahill and Paul Lemo shared some updates on a highly specific live fire test.
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: Right, they took a joint air-to-ground missile, a JGM ,and launched it from this containerized grizzly y launcher.
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: but the crazy part was that integrated with sanctum then tied everything into third party radar Fordham
• 3:31
  Speaker 0: Technologies R-Forty Radar to be exact Yeah And successfully intercepted an attack drum.
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: It's just massive that these giant primes are learning how to play nice with specialist ecosystem partners.
• 3:42
  Speaker 0: Exactly, it proves you can create these rapid modular setups without waiting a decade.
• 3:48
  Speaker 0: but form factor is huge here too.
• 3:51
  Speaker 0: Tom Adams from Drone Shield break down how dismounted tech, it's changing things
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: like stuff an individual soldier can actually carry.
• 3:58
  Speaker 0: yeah he detailed their RF patrol MK two which detects drone radio frequencies and they're droned gun Mk four Which actively defeats them.
• 4:07
  Speaker 0: you need that mobility because a drone could literally pop up behind the tree line fifty yards away.
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: so true.
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: But to really win that cost exchange battle long term Just playing defense isn't enough.
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: You need autonomous mass on your own side!
• 4:19
  Speaker 0: Absolutely, which brings us to the industry's biggest nightmare... The Valley of Death.
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: Uh yeah Alana Gold had a really sobering post reflecting on warning from investor Ross Fubini.
• 4:30
  Speaker 0: FUBINI is not someone to ignore either?
• 4:32
  Speaker 0: No
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: definitely not.
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: He was warning founders that defense tech startups are basically heading straight for the valley of death.
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: As Alana noted, the technology gets you the meeting but production is what actually keeps you alive.
• 4:45
  Speaker 0: Right they build a great prototype But then they just die because they can't scale it while waiting on the Pentagon's painfully slow procurement process.
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: So let me push back on this bit.
• 4:54
  Speaker 1: In the commercial tech world, like The Valley of Death is where bad ideas die right?
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: If your app doesn't work it goes under.
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: Sure So Is the defense tech valley-of-death actually filtering out bad technology?
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: or is the DoD's slow system just accidentally starving the exact innovators they say they desperately need?
• 5:12
  Speaker 0: It is definitely starving the innovators.
• 5:14
  Speaker 0: Commercial markets filter for product market fit but defense procurement filters from bureaucratic endurance.
• 5:20
  Speaker 0: It's a system built for buying aircraft carriers over thirty years, not software-defined drones.
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: Right which need updates every three months?
• 5:28
  Speaker 0: Exactly!
• 5:29
  Speaker 0: But we are seeing some startups break out.
• 5:32
  Speaker 0: Eugene Guy and Robert McFauls shared this massive update about Enduril winning the US Air Force CCA production contract
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: The collaborative combat aircraft program.
• 5:42
  Speaker 1: that is huge deal.
• 5:43
  Speaker 0: it is especially because two years ago Endurill actually lost the mission autonomy competition for that exact program.
• 5:50
  Speaker 0: Wait,
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: really?
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: They lost it and still came back!
• 5:52
  Speaker 0: Yeah they completely rebuilt their lattice autonomy software from scratch using internal capital yeah.
• 5:58
  Speaker 0: And now they're pushing the FQ-IV drone into serial production.
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: That is insane resilience...and we are seeing European joint ventures hit scale too.
• 6:06
  Speaker 1: Florian Sybil posted about quantum ten core delivering two thousand termite unmanned ground vehicles to Ukraine
• 6:13
  Speaker 0: Delivering two thousand units as real scale..that's not just a lab experiment anymore
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: No, it's real battlefield impact.
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: And the ultimate proof of this autonomous capability has to be what happened in The Strait Of Hormuz.
• 6:25
  Speaker 1: Weston Moyer and Sophia Rose Haft highlighted this incredible story...
• 6:29
  Speaker 0: Oh!
• 6:29
  Speaker 0: The Sironic Rescue?
• 6:30
  Speaker 0: That was incredible.
• 6:31
  Speaker 0: Yeah.
• 6:32
  Speaker 1: Sironics' twenty-four foot Corsair Autonomous Boat rescued two down American pilots at three a.m..
• 6:38
  Speaker 0: And keep in mind, Task Force-Fifty Nine has spent years out on those waters validating these unmanned systems.
• 6:44
  Speaker 0: That trust literally paid off by bringing two pilots home safely.
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: It's amazing.
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: but here is the catch right?
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: Having thousands of autonomous drones and boats basically useless if a warfighter can't easily command them.
• 6:56
  Speaker 0: Which brings us to theme number three Software integration & Command.
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: Honestly, legacy military integration reminds me of the dark ages of early computing.
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: Like when every piece of hardware required a custom proprietary cord just to plug it in.
• 7:09
  Speaker 0: Oh I remember that you had different charger for every single device.
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: Exactly so.
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: why has it taken The Military this long?
• 7:15
  Speaker 1: To adopt a basic app store mentality where systems Just talk to each other via open APIs.
• 7:21
  Speaker 0: Well because those proprietary silos were incredibly lucrative For the Legacy primes.
• 7:27
  Speaker 0: but That's finally breaking.
• 7:29
  Speaker 0: Matt Bonaman and Christian Brose posted about the US Army's operation jailbreak.
• 7:34
  Speaker 1: Jailbreaking the battlefield, I love that term!
• 7:36
  Speaker 0: It is so accurate.
• 7:37
  Speaker 0: Lockheed Martin Sanctum was officially jailbroken meaning their APIs were opened up to break down those legacy barriers.
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: And Daryl Lattice won the army command-and control competition right?
• 7:47
  Speaker 0: Yeah it now anchors the IBCS maneuver program.
• 7:50
  Speaker 0: The core philosophy shift here is massive.
• 7:52
  Speaker 0: They want a move of cognitive burden.
• 7:54
  Speaker 0: So this soldier is the crew chief for AI
• 7:56
  Speaker 1: instead of just acting as the human adapter between three disconnected screens.
• 8:00
  Speaker 0: Exactly, and Simon Luck posted a perfect example from Exercise Northern Star.
• 8:04
  Speaker 0: British and Finnish troops were near Russian border using Enderill's ghost-and-bolt drones on the Lattice network.
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: And get this!
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: These are non specialist soldiers who learn the whole system in
• 8:15
  Speaker 0: mere days... That is The Power Of Intuitive Software.
• 8:19
  Speaker 0: Joshua Baggett also noted that Lockheed's project Overwatch just delivered the first in-flight tactical AI combat ID for F-thirty five.
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: Wow, AI right on the cockpit!
• 8:31
  Speaker 0: Speaking of data... General David Petraeus highlighted something wild out of Ukraine The Trophy Lab launch.
• 8:37
  Speaker 1: Oh, the crowd sourcing platform!
• 8:39
  Speaker 0: Exactly they are effectively crowdsourcing battlefield intelligence by opening access to captured Russian weapons technology for global partners.
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: that is just brilliant.
• 8:49
  Speaker 1: but you know we do have to ground all this software talk in physical reality
• 8:53
  Speaker 0: right?
• 8:53
  Speaker 0: Right...the hardware still has to be built
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: and paid-for which brings us to the harsh realities of the industrial base and vendor dependence.
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: Jason Bowers did this deep dive.
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: that kind of blew my mind.
• 9:03
  Speaker 0: The SpaceX Starlink situation?
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: Yes, SpaceX charged the Pentagon five times its previous rate for starlink on LUCS attack drones during active strikes and the DoD just had to pay it.
• 9:15
  Speaker 0: Talk about having zero leverage.
• 9:17
  Speaker 0: That's a terrifying level of vendor dependence
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: Totally.
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: And while thats happening Allied nations are struggling with bad spending habits.
• 9:24
  Speaker 1: Luca Leon posted about UK defense debate.
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: It's not just about needing more money, it's about stopping terrible spending.
• 9:30
  Speaker 0: Like the tank fleet?
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: Exactly!
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: They are preserving one to two hundred legacy tanks... ...just to avoid exposing a seven-hundred million pound sunk cost and doing
• 9:40
  Speaker 0: that
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: actively starves their twenty thirty capabilities.
• 9:43
  Speaker 0: That sunk cost fallacy is dangerous And Dr Jonas Singer had very sobering post about this.
• 9:49
  Speaker 0: He said NATO three point.
• 9:50
  Speaker 0: oh as budget Not an army.
• 9:52
  Speaker 1: Ouch.
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: But he's not wrong.
• 9:55
  Speaker 0: He pointed out the Bundeswehr is short over seven thousand recruits for their twenty-twenty six buildout.
• 10:00
  Speaker 0: A treasury can move money in an afternoon, but building a bench of experienced NCOs takes a decade.
• 10:06
  Speaker 1: so true.
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: So how was the industrial base trying to fix this physical manufacturing bottleneck?
• 10:12
  Speaker 0: Well Zach Silber highlighted a company called Standard & Works.
• 10:15
  Speaker 0: They're building a defense manufacturing campus down at Moorsville North Carolina.
• 10:19
  Speaker 1: Okay leveraging the local talent.
• 10:21
  Speaker 0: Yeah, they're actively using NASCAR engineers to work at what they call motorsport speed.
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: Okay wait I have to challenge that analogy!
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: NASCAR Speed sounds amazing for a pitch deck but building a race car quickly is one thing.
• 10:31
  Speaker 1: it only has to survive a five hundred mile Sunday drive
• 10:34
  Speaker 0: Right on the smooth track.
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: If it breaks... A pit crew fixes in ten seconds.
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: Can start-up speed manufacturing actually produce ruggedized hardware That survives a grueling ten year deployment In mud and sand?
• 10:48
  Speaker 0: It's totally fair question.
• 10:50
  Speaker 0: But the idea behind motorsport speed isn't about making flimsy hardware, it's about iteration.
• 10:55
  Speaker 0: Instead of taking five years to redesign a drone chassis they can analyze a failure machine in new part and have back-in-the-field in weeks.
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: So its' the speed at the iteration cycle.
• 11:05
  Speaker 1: not necessarily life span on first prototype Exactly!
• 11:09
  Speaker 0: And legacy primes know that need this speed.
• 11:11
  Speaker 0: Julian Cracknell Robert Merriweather and Helen Wood all-referenced BAE systems committing fifty million euros to VC funds via Launchpad, the back European defense tech.
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: Wow!
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: They are literally paying to inject that startup speed into their own ecosystems
• 11:26
  Speaker 0: because they have too.
• 11:27
  Speaker 0: and if you really want talk about grueling deployments in ruggedized hardware I wanna leave with a final thought inspired by David Cowes post.
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: Oh About physical AI.
• 11:35
  Speaker 0: Yes He argues that Physical AI is becoming a geopolitical infrastructure layer.
• 11:41
  Speaker 0: NASA's thirty billion dollar moon base is going to require robots operating with no GPS, severe communications latency and three hundred degree temperature swings.
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: That makes the mud of a terrestrial battlefield look pretty easy
• 11:54
  Speaker 0: Exactly!
• 11:55
  Speaker 0: The ultimate proving ground for next generation defense tech might not be on Earth at all.
• 12:00
  Speaker 0: It may be navigating extreme conditions in space essentially writing playbook for future autonomous warfare.
• 12:07
  Speaker 1: that was wild thought.
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: If you enjoyed this episode, new episodes drop every two weeks.
• 12:13
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• 12:22
  Speaker 0: Absolutely!
• 12:22
  Speaker 0: Thank You so much for joining us as we unpack these realities.
• 12:25
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• 12:27
  Speaker 1: Thanks For Tuning In And We'll Catch Ya Next Time.