The Missing Power Layer of Modern Warfare

Erin Price-Wright speaks with Adam Warmoth, founder and CEO of Chariot Defense, and Alex Miller, CTO of the U. S. Army, about the power crisis at the heart of modern military operations. As the battlefield becomes more distributed and electronics-heavy, the Army's legacy power infrastructure, built around diesel generators and lead-acid batteries, is struggling to keep up. They examine how commercial breakthroughs in EV and aviation technology are being adapted for the front line, why fuel convoys are a military liability, and how procurement reform is letting startups get hardware into soldiers' hands faster than ever.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  All the things we want to do is really about the soldier. In the mud, cold, wet, tired, hungry. What makes their lives easier or better? Your average soldier today, they're drawing just by themselves 30 to 60 watts of power continuously during their operations. So that's basically a mid-tier laptop running all the time.

• 0:18Speaker 01

  We are moving towards an increasingly electronic battlefield. There's really this missing power layer that is required to actually field all those systems. Chariot is building the tactical power layer for robotic warfare. So we had a lot of passive capabilities that were able to hide, kind of sense, without kind of giving away position, but needed the ability to go active when we needed to make an interception. So that meant that we had to bring the 15-kilowatt generator that was 99% of the time running at 500 watts, creating this detectable signature, both from the thermal and acoustic signature, and then the resupply because it's using fuel so inefficiently.

• 0:48Speaker 00

  So there are all these things that create a signature in environments where there shouldn't be signatures, and that means that we can be targeted.

• 0:54Speaker 01

  So someone will go plug in a copy pot, and it'll take down the air defense radar.

• 0:59Erik Torenberg?

  Modern warfare runs on electrons. Drones, sensors, electronic warfare systems, edge AI. Every capability the army wants to field draws power. But the infrastructure delivering that power hasn't kept pace. For decades of counterinsurgency, diesel generators and fixed forward operating bases were enough. Today, the battlefield is distributed, decentralized, and contested. Every generator running at 1% capacity is a targetable thermal signature. Every fuel convoy supplying it is a liability. The question isn't how to power more things. It's what the right things are and how to make that power invisible to the enemy.

• 1:43Erik Torenberg?

  Aaron Price Wright speaks with Adam Warmoth, founder and CEO of Chariot Defense, and Alex Miller, CTO of the U.S. Army.

• 1:55Erin Price-Wright?

  We're here today with Adam Warmoth and Alex Miller. Adam is the founder and CEO of Chariot Defense, which builds next-generation power systems for the battlefield. Before that, he led engineering at Anduril and product at Archer Aviation. And Alex is the CTO of the US Army, where he runs all things technology. He's the driving force behind the Army's push, thank you, to get new tech into soldiers' hands fast. Adam, Alex, welcome to the A16Z Show.

• 2:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, thanks for having me.

• 2:21Speaker 00

  Take care.

• 2:22Erin Price-Wright?

  Maybe just getting right into it. Adam, for listeners, in 60 seconds, what is Chariot building? Who's the end user? And what does winning look like for you guys in the field?

• 2:32Speaker 01

  It's a great question. Chariot is building the tactical power layer for robotic worker. The reason why Chariot needs to exist in the world is we are moving towards an increasingly electronic battlefield at the same time that is becoming more distributed, more decentralized. And we're building kind of these new systems or pushing these new systems down to these operational mobile forces that now need to sustain equipment, have organic capabilities around command and control, around counter UAS, around air defense, EW, all of these electronic systems. And there's really this missing power layer that is required to actually field all those systems. So when I was leading counter UAS at Anduril, we were fielding all of these new systems into expeditionary environments and constantly running into problems with the existing power solutions being insufficient

• 3:15Speaker 01

  for what they're being asked to do in that new environment. So what we're doing is basically building integrated battery, power electronics, microcontroller systems that allow you to hybridize your systems. So we're not going to replace diesel fuel. We're not going to replace power generation. What we can do is be much more smart and be much more tactical about how we actually employ and distribute power.

• 3:35Erin Price-Wright?

  Awesome. And now, Alex, for listeners, what is the CTO of the Army actually mean in practice? What do you control versus influence? And what are you trying to change right now?

• 3:45Speaker 00

  No, it's a good question. It's an all-influence operation. So I will tell you the real driving force between all the change, really a Secretary Driscoll, General George is the chief of staff of the Army. And then I have an amazing partner in Mr. Brent Ingraham as the Army Acquisition Executive. So right now, at this point in time, influence is really easy because I have willing partners and willing leadership who say, we are going to change things for the better. But what it means for me in practice, what I do control, is getting out and actually seeing the problem set with my own eyes, digging in with my hands, actually being there, seeing it, doing it, which you don't see a lot of. Generally, the Pentagon becomes very insular and people just sort of hang out there and drive things from the top.

• 4:28Speaker 00

  It becomes much easier when you really understand from the bottom, from soldiers in the mud, cold, wet, tired, hungry, what makes their lives easier or better. That is my job to go understand the problem space rather than just approaching bright, shiny objects or chasing technology.

• 4:44Erin Price-Wright?

  That's awesome. So maybe let's set the scene. The Army is adding drones, sensors, electronic warfare, edge AI, autonomous systems. We've heard about this. It's happening faster than ever. And we're here because there are gaps in our power infrastructure. So maybe, Adam, let's start with you. Paint us the picture of a tactical operations center right now. What's physically there? What's running? What's consuming power? What are the gaps?

• 5:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a great question. So the tactical operations center today looks a lot different than it looked five years ago. As we transition from a very counterinsurgency-focused force structure to a very large-scale combat operations, distributed, decentralized. And so you're seeing brigade command posts and brigade operational centers that are smaller than a battalion command post was before. And so what you're doing is you're pushing a lot of capabilities that used to be able to live at these big fix-site fobs. Right? So those forward operating bases that were dug in, were doing construction.

• 5:36Erin Price-Wright?

  Like semi-permanent.

• 5:37Speaker 01

  That's right. And so things like mobility didn't matter. Things like signature management didn't matter. Even logistics mattered and logistics was painful, but we kind of lived with those logistical burdens. And the reason was we were fighting on kind of this barbell of the operational spectrum and where there was kind of short patrols happening from where all the soldiers really needed to carry with them was a radio to communicate back to that brigade command post that was kind of dug in and fixed and could provide air defense, ISR, C2 capabilities, as long as they could communicate with that forward force. What we're seeing is that every kind of link in that chain has been disrupted. So if you think about a platoon forward deployed, needs to go see over that next mountain to know what's on the other side of that terrain feature. They would call back for support to this big fixed command post. That command post would launch a drone, you know, fixed wing drone from a runway.

• 6:22Speaker 01

  That would get overhead and kind of provide time on station and stream down a high bandwidth 30 FPS full motion video stream down to that platoon and they would have that intelligence picture. Every link in that chain has been disrupted in a large scale combat operation fight. That transmission back to base is going to get that triangulated and detected and targeted. The runway that they'd be launching that from has been destroyed by the enemy's long range strike capabilities. If you do manage to get ISR overhead, right, that's going to be contested, but it's going to be shot down. And if it does manage to maintain time on station, that video link down to it is being jacked. And so what that means is we're pushing a lot of those capabilities down to the company, the platoon level. And so your command post is now much more distributed. You're running command and control out of a single truck rather than these big kind of semi-permanent installations.

• 7:07Erin Price-Wright?

  So we're starting to see this shift already, but let's take that same talk and add everything that the army wants to do in the next, let's say, two to three years. Next generation command and control, AI, more autonomous systems. How does that power map change?

• 7:22Speaker 00

  Sure. So before we actually talk about the tactical operations center, let's actually talk about the soldier. So all the things we want to do is really about the soldier. Your average soldier today might have one or two radios, depending on if they're in a leadership position. As we think through things like soldier born mission command, as we think through drone batteries, as we think through their EUD, their in-user device, or something like a tactical android assault kit, they're drawing just by themselves 30 to 60 watts of power continuously during their operation. So that's basically a mid-tier laptop running all the time. So if you run that over a 72-hour operation, they might be drawing between 1.5 and 2 kilowatt hours just by themselves before you start adding their team, their squad, their platoon.

• 8:07Speaker 00

  So before we start talking about the fixed positions and the mobile positions, power looks different at the soldier level. Now for things like Nixgin Command and Control, one of our goals is really making those platforms much more power efficient, but also bringing down the size of those command posts. So we had this wonderful set of experimentation called Transforming in Contact, where the very first unit that went through that, the 2nd Brigade 101st Strike, their brigade command post was five Humvees backed up to each other. Whereas normally, a brigade's TAC by doctrine is 4,000 square feet. So if you think through, just making it smaller forces us to have less servers, less computers, less fans, less TVs,

• 8:52Speaker 00

  because you walk into every JOC and it looks like a Taj Mahal of TVs and routers and everything. Just by minimizing the footprint, we've reduced how much stuff we have, which means we've reduced our power draw. So as we then take that truth and look at Nixgin Command and Control, which is our full stack deployment of how do you do infrastructure for communications, infrastructure for software platforms, infrastructure for software services like autonomous warfare, like robotic warfare, and then the delivery. So everything from your apps or your TAC tools or the websites that you hit, being able to deliver that as one set of platforms as a full stack, rather than the 17 disparate systems that came before it,

• 9:35Speaker 00

  means less servers, less radios, less routers, less cabling, less comms antenna, less noise makers. That is what we're going for to. It's not just trying to find better ways to power everything we had. It's actually thinking through what should we have? And then how do we power that?

• 9:52Erin Price-Wright?

  So, I mean, you've seen some of this in the field, Adam and Andrel. You were at Andrel for three and a half years, building counter drone systems. What did the power problem for these actually look like in practice for you? What was failing in your experience?

• 10:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that experience really shaped what Charity Defense is today, which was we were supporting expeditionary counter-U.S. operations before Ukraine, before it was kind of the kind of in vogue topic. And it's because we were working with SOCOM, who was kind of running into these problems ahead of the conventional force. You know, when we started fueling those systems, I assumed, cool, hey, we bring the robots, right? And there'll be somewhere for us to plug in.

• 10:31Erin Price-Wright?

  Yeah.

• 10:32Speaker 01

  And quickly realized that that was not the case and that your options today were kind of small or like lead-acid batteries, not really designed for energy storage and power distribution, or kind of massive diesel generators. And we certainly kind of believe in diesel being part of this solution. We're very much a hybrid power company. It's very energy dense compared to batteries. But what not having a kind of hybrid system forced us to do was size our power generation to the peak demand of that counter-U.S. kit. So we had a lot of passive capabilities that we were able to hide, kind of sense, without kind of giving away position, but needed the ability to go active when we needed to make an interception. So that meant that we had to bring the 15-kilowatt generator that was 99% of the

• 11:14Speaker 01

  time running at 500 watts, which means it's using fuel very inefficiently. It's causing reliability challenges. It's taking up a lot of space on that aircraft that's air assaulting in. It's creating a detectable signature, both from the thermal and acoustic signature, and then the resupply because it's using fuel so inefficiently. So all of that creates a targetable signature that's throwing away a lot of those benefits of that passive counter-U.S. system. So that's really where we believe in hybrid. We believe in batteries as power, power management, power distribution, kind of pairing with the existing power generation assets in the Army around the vehicles and the power generation that exists.

• 11:49Erin Price-Wright?

  Would love, you know, on this topic of kind of the generators and the diesel systems that are in use today, you know, they produce heat, noise, emissions, they can be detected and targeted. You know, we were also just talking earlier about how much of a target these fuel convoys are. Would love to hear kind of your perspective. How big of a problem is it for the Army?

• 12:06Speaker 00

  That's a good question. So there was a long period of time where being an 88 Mike, a truck driver, was one of the most dangerous jobs because you're basically driving, you're driving a truck full of liquid explosive, you're driving a truck full of fuel. So it didn't matter how efficient the generators got, they still needed fuel to run. And all of the signature that we're thinking about for even in the world we're seeing today, over the weekend and into today, signature really matters. So if you are creating a thermal signature because your generator is running all the time, you can be found.

• 12:37Erin Price-Wright?

  And so maybe for the very tech illiterate, of which there are probably not many listening to this podcast, thermal signature is basically heat.

• 12:45Speaker 00

  It's heat. So if your phone gets hot when you're using it too much, and that's a thermal signature, if you put your, the easiest way, if you go put your hand on top of your refrigerator at home, it's warm because it's actually generating, it's using energy, it's generating that and it's putting out thermal energy.

• 13:01Erin Price-Wright?

  And that means that the enemy could potentially detect.

• 13:04Speaker 00

  And you can see it.

• 13:05Erin Price-Wright?

  Yeah.

• 13:06Speaker 00

  You can see it because it's part of the spectrum. It's why hunters use thermal cameras. Everything generates that. Same with acoustics. So it makes noise because you can hear it for a long distance, especially when you're in flat terrain or nothing else should be making noise. Batteries, if they are not coated correctly, if the converters aren't shielded, they actually produce electromagnetic noise. So you can find that as well. So there are all these things that create a signature in environments where there shouldn't be signatures and that means that we can be targeted. That's one of the areas that we are really thankful for new players that are emerging in the portfolio that say, I know that I have to generate power. We don't live in a world where we own everything all the time. Therefore, it has to actually produce power in a way that's useful.

• 13:50Speaker 00

  And useful in this context is low thermal output, low acoustic output. So can't be hot, can't be loud, and it's got to be easy to actually move.

• 14:01Erin Price-Wright?

  Yeah, the easy to move, I think, is also underrated.

• 14:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, yes.

• 14:06Erin Price-Wright?

  As a challenge. So maybe, Adam, back to you, what exactly is your first product? How does it work? How's it different from a traditional battery system?

• 14:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, and we actually tend to lead our products with their consensus employment because that's really what makes our product interesting.

• 14:23Erin Price-Wright?

  Yeah.

• 14:24Speaker 01

  And so what our first product is, is an 424 system. It's a 4 kilowatt system, 4 kilowatt hours of energy storage. But what it does is it can deploy at kind of the squad up to battalion level.

• 14:35Erin Price-Wright?

  Maybe for, just contextualize, how much is that? Like, what does that power?

• 14:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it depends on the use case. And that's kind of the great thing about having this universal product is, so we went out to our first transformation contact exercise back in May of last year. That was six months from first check into the company. So kudos to the Army Transformation Initiative in terms of its ability to bring new companies in to say, hey, we're going to work with this. We're going to bring it in, right? We're not going to make you file six months' worth of paperwork. We're not going to say, hey, we already started planning this exercise six months ago. Try again next year. And so we brought it out there. And a lot of it was, hey, let's discover those use cases on the ground. We had a multifunctional reconnaissance company, which is one of the new elements in the Mobile Brigade Combat Teams, actually air assault in with that 424 system. They're able to run 36 hours without generating any kind of detectable thermal or acoustic signature,

• 15:22Speaker 01

  running their radios, their EW equipment, their drones. At a battalion command post, you're looking more at like two or three hours. And this is where we say, hey, the battery is not really the answer from an energy perspective. In some cases, it can be for a limited amount of time. But at a battalion command post, what we saw was guys idling trucks under camo nets giving them carbon dioxide poisoning because they had no way to convert their AC generator power to DC power. Or we saw the executive officer having to choose who got to plug their laptops in so they wouldn't overload those generation assets. And so what our system does is it kind of drops in the middle and kind of acts as this converter, buffer.

• 15:57Erin Price-Wright?

  A buffer zone.

• 15:57Speaker 01

  Manager, exactly. That lets you handle the big surges on the output side without passing those through to your loads, lets you shut your generation off to go into that low signature kind of hiding mode, gives you failover when those power generation assets fail.

• 16:12Speaker 01

  Gives you high quality power to your C2 equipment and a lot of that NGC2 equipment.

• 16:16Erin Price-Wright?

  What do you mean when you say high quality power?

• 16:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it is a bit of a nuanced like a.

• 16:22Erin Price-Wright?

  It's like electrons, you know?

• 16:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, when you plug into traditional generators and you have a big surge of load, a lot of times that can pass, that can impact the generator's ability to generate your kind of clean sine wave alternating current power.

• 16:38Speaker 01

  When you're plugging into maybe host nation shore power, right? There's brownouts, blackouts, voltage spikes. All of that is kind of kryptonite to these command and control systems.

• 16:49Erin Price-Wright?

  Yeah, I mean, I'm being somewhat facetious, but like if you, you know, a lot of.

• 16:52Speaker 00

  It's a real thing.

• 16:53Erin Price-Wright?

  It's a real and a lot of people who work in tech and who listen to this podcast sit where in, you know, Silicon Valley in the United States where maybe they have a power outage every once in a while, but really don't have to reckon with what it means to, what it means to not have kind of reliable, consistent power for their laptops.

• 17:10Speaker 00

  And it's, it's one of those things where if you've, you've traveled overseas and you plug your phone into a wall after you've figured out which adapter and it doesn't charge quite right, you can tell that it's taken too long or it's getting really hot.

• 17:21Erin Price-Wright?

  Or if you're me and you blow out your, your, your hair dryer.

• 17:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, so, so like clean power is something that we used to talk about a lot more. And then we figured out how to put generators in the middle and separate ourselves, but those were fuel driven. So having clean, consistent power, that's, that's a really important topic.

• 17:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. And you brought up the wrong voltage, wrong frequency, right? You know, stuff that's probably in your hair dryer, right? So a big part of how we're going to fight and how we're fighting now is with allies that don't always share the same power standards. So the other thing our system can do is act as that software defined power layer to bring all of these different sources together and power all these different outputs. Right now, there's really no smarts running on kind of, there's no like kind of routing happening with power. So someone will go plug in a coffee pot and it'll take down the air defense radar. And so what we're doing is applying that smart power layer that's able to manage, that's able to optimize, that's able to forecast and simulate, that's able to convert to the right voltage, the right frequency, through hot software handshakes between systems.

• 18:20Speaker 01

  And so I think, yeah, people don't realize how much room there is to improve the current power situation, how much in counterincertainty, we just got away with some bad habits around this stuff, and how much we're really going to have to transform to meet this new, modern type of way.

• 18:36Speaker 00

  But I'm glad you brought up the coffee maker. So this is sort of a tangent. It's also an education on things that are very high draw versus things that are very low draw, because a lot of people don't understand, as soon as you plug your coffee maker in or a microwave, you are changing the nature of how much power you're drawing, because it is going to spike immediately. Versus, a lot of our drone batteries are much, much lower draw, but they're longer.

• 18:57Erin Price-Wright?

  Yeah.

• 18:57Speaker 00

  So you need that energy, it's just not spiking and bringing down your torque, which definitely didn't do, the coffee maker.

• 19:05Erin Price-Wright?

  Yeah, it's like, in our pantry, we have a microwave and a toaster oven, can't run both of them at the same time.

• 19:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly.

• 19:11Erin Price-Wright?

  I remember that the hard way approximately once a week.

• 19:15Speaker 01

  And then the software layer that we're adding is, instead of expecting our end-user level operators to really be PhDs in power, instead of that, if you just add that software layer that can say, like, hey, instead of turning on all three air conditioners at the same time, turn one on, wait three seconds, turn the other on, wait three seconds, turn the other on, wait three seconds. Very simple, zero operational impact, you've now cut your peak power demand by a factor of three, which means you've cut the size and weight of your system by a factor of three. So some very small improvements with software can have a major impact on mission outcomes.

• 19:49Erin Price-Wright?

  And so, Adam, Chariot's core insight is that the commercial EV and EV-tall industries have largely already solved this, or solved this to some extent. Can you explain that in more detail? What made you connect the dots between the tech on the commercial side and the military application?

• 20:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. So the time I spent in my first career, and when I come out of college, outside of my time at Andorl, was in the electric aircraft industry. Electric energy is only possible because of some incredible breakthroughs happening in the in the technology sector for these core kind of electro-industrial stack components around high voltage batteries, silicon carbide power electronics. It's this like almost magical new technology that lets you do all of these things in terms of kind of software controlled power, really high compact, high density. And so there's some incredible breakthroughs there, same breakthroughs that are behind, you know, Heron Power, right, same breakthroughs that are behind companies like Impulse Stoves even, is these really high powered NC electronics. And so that was all happening really in the commercial sector, right? Tesla kind of leading the way there.

• 20:50Speaker 01

  Two of our leading electric aircraft companies, you know, are in the Bay Area, about 20 miles from Tesla headquarters, right? You know, Joby and Archer, not in LA where you might expect them to be. And it's because these incredible breakthroughs happening in the commercial sector that actually allow your hybrid system to win on kind of size and cost and weight compared to traditional combustion engine system. And so that improvement's been kind of happening over the past 30 years in the industrial sector and what we're doing is kind of through good forward deployed engineering and good, you know, kind of go to market and building the product in a way that's informed by our experience getting into the budding dirt with the warfighter. We can kind of take that that amazing technology advancements and bring it into the department in a way that's similar to what Andrell did with self-driving car technology and autonomy developed from that industry to what Palantir did in terms of their they're working with

• 21:35Speaker 01

  kind of cloud compute and big data processing. Technology invented commercially, brought to department. It's been kind of a flip from what we saw in the Cold War, right? Which was GPS, internet really invented in kind of research labs, brought into the commercial sector. We've seen a bit of a flip there and we're kind of probably that trend.

• 21:52Erin Price-Wright?

  Coming full circle. And I mean, you mentioned this earlier, but you went from founding the company to having a system in the field in six months. How did you achieve that? How would have, and how maybe would that have? Looked differently under the old model before we had people like Alex pushing things forward.

• 22:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I talked about a little bit of just like, you know, the the paper drills, right? And kind of the the process following and the kind of inflexibility to say, why does this process exist? Right? And I think we kind of lost track of that, where the process kind of became the outcome. Versus, you know, the outcome is winning, like, we want to win. And then, like, okay, the process exists. And we have things around like fairness, and we have things around, you know, you know, the kind of right regulations and stuff, so that everyone kind of feels like they have enough of a shot to keep new entrants participating. But there was kind of then this overcorrection where the the process became the outcome. And I think what you've seen with the the guidance from Secretary Hegseth and Secretary Traskol

• 22:55Speaker 01

  and General George is is really refocusing on the outcome. And what that means, if you focus on the outcome, is, hey, just because this company didn't exist when we started planning this exercise, literally, for that JRTC exercise, we did not exist when that planning kicked off.

• 23:11Speaker 01

  And and it's kind of been a complete transformation in terms of the willingness to accept risk, the willingness to kind of bring in new entrants, right? And just, I think that really that that outcome focus is really what I would say is the kind of central tenet of the transformation initiative.

• 23:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, I agree. And and this is really the core tenet of Secretary Hegseth and Secretary Duffy and Secretary Michael for acquisition and sustainment, research engineering, and of course, the the department. That's really what they're talking about in terms of, it's a cliche, well, overused, it's buying runs. It's it's not, hey, our goal is to field a team. No, our goal is to actually win. And then you field a team that's going to win, and you work backwards. So the transforming in contact, when we first started, it was all about how do we flood the zone for those units, give them all of the technology to solve their problems, and then we will find out what doesn't work, we'll find out what worked, but needs maybe some adjustment, rather than

• 24:04Speaker 00

  The two years of writing requirement, the five to seven years of trying to field something and then going, ooh, I don't think we bought and made the right thing.

• 24:12Erin Price-Wright?

  The right thing after all. So maybe to that end, like, what have been some of the product lessons that you've learned deploying directly in the field? I joke, like, I've jokingly called you the chief forward deployed engineer because when you look at, when you look at Adam's calendar, it's basically impossible to get him a person in San Francisco for, for, for, let's say, a term sheet signing dinner. Because he spends all of his time essentially in the mud.

• 24:39Speaker 00

  I feel like she's gonna slide something over.

• 24:43Erin Price-Wright?

  So would love to hear, like, what are some of the specific lessons that you've learned and feedback that you might not have gotten if you hadn't had the opportunity to really deploy with a warfighter and get some of that direct product feedback?

• 24:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, and I've had the opportunity to see Alex out in the field at JRTC out in the mud out there, at NTC out in the desert, you know, spending three weeks living out of, you know, motels and, you know, just getting out of the field with, with the soldiers.

• 25:06Speaker 00

  Just really enjoying bars, though.

• 25:08Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 25:08Speaker 00

  All that it has to offer.

• 25:09Speaker 01

  Yep, yep, exactly. And so, you know, that's, that's really been a great experience as I've spent a lot of time, I think Alex could also probably be called chief forward deployed engineer as well, and, you know, just embracing that model of, you know, we're gonna get out and we're gonna learn. We're shipping version 5.2 of our system today as a system that we're actually selling and delivering to army units right now. And so that's, you know, in, in just a year, right, that, you know, going from version one, you know, our first system we actually ever built is still up, actually deployed with a unit in Alaska because they wouldn't let us take it home after the demo. But they also had a lot of really good feedback for us and said, don't take this home, we like it as it is, but if you were to change something, here's what you should change. And a lot

• 25:52Speaker 01

  of those changes have been, how do we actually make this as drop in as possible to the doctrine, to the training, right, to the, to the existing equipment, right, really focused on that interoperability, that ease of use.

• 26:04Erin Price-Wright?

  Is that like hardware interoperability, software interoperability that allows for interoperability? What do you mean when you say drop in?

• 26:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's all the above, including, including just kind of the concepts of operation, how they would transport it, how they would load it onto different platforms, you know, so one of the key things that our system has is every tactical vehicle and combat vehicle in the army has this NATO port on it, that today they only use basically to jump a truck when its battery dies because someone left the radio on overnight. That is effectively though, something that ties you right into that vehicle's electrical system. And so we realized, oh hey, we can actually drop something in there, we can plug into that port. They actually already have that cable. And so with something that like, we just delivered this one box, we make it super simple to use, we have one switch to operate it. You know, that was kind of the thing that we really learned and iterated on. We dropped it in, okay, well now they plug it in and now it's gonna, now they end up with a dead truck.

• 26:55Speaker 01

  If they charge our systems, like, okay, well, let's add that bidirectional charging. So we'll charge our system, but then when the truck turns off and they're running loads up the truck, we'll push power back in. So things like that were things that we learned by actually getting out of the field. Doing this at a time and transformation in contact because the formation structures are changing so rapidly, right? That there was no textbook that you can like read on, and especially around power, people really can't describe their power needs, you know, their connectors, their voltages, their frequencies. You kind of have to get out there in the field, give them something and they say, hey, this doesn't work. And again, kind of coming back to, we don't actually really like talking about our products. We like talking about what does it enable? How can they be more lethal, more survivable, you know, more operationally independent with this capability? And so you can really only learn that by getting to deal with them, seeing the soldier

• 27:40Speaker 01

  innovation of, hey, what uses do they come up with it? One of the multipurpose companies threw it onto a robotic vehicle and went and drove around silently, you know, silently beyond the flot while powering all their systems. And we're like, okay, that's a use case we should design for.

• 27:52Erin Price-Wright?

  And I know you actually just got back from the Arctic with the 11th Airborne. Would be curious to hear some of the things you've observed, whether specifically related to kind of on the ground, resupply, power management, power supply chains.

• 28:11Speaker 00

  Everything breaks at negative 40. JP-8 freezes at negative 53. When you are about negative 20 or below, by the time you issue you the battery for your radios from the Connex, they're dead. So one of the, one of the lessons, so I had the opportunity to go up to 11th Airborne's JPMRC Alaska rotation. So First Brigade was their training unit, Second Brigade was the OP-4. And they gave a master class on how do you make the things that you have work? And then we also were able to... Provide them through DevCom several experimental types of power generation management and storage techniques, a lot of it focused on small batteries and how do you keep those

• 28:53Speaker 00

  from cold soaking, which is the condition where it gets so cold for so long, it actually destroys part of the chemistry of the battery and it doesn't charge properly. How do you prevent that? And soldiers come up with the best solutions. And like one soldier took a space blanket and just wrapped the drone on the battery and it produced enough heat that it kept, it actually kept it thermally insulated enough to fly. So that's super, super simple, doesn't need a whole bunch of other things. DevCom brought some battery heaters, which just slaps onto the cells, draws about 10% of the power, power from the battery, but keeps it long enough that, keeps it warm enough that it will fly.

• 29:30Erin Price-Wright?

  It's usable, yes.

• 29:31Speaker 00

  So all of these edge cases were really, really interesting to see soldiers do, but they're edge cases. So we saw a lot of the very similar things at J M R C in Germany last year, where it wasn't negative 20, it was about 20 degrees and we saw the same failure. So now we can figure out, and I'm glad you brought up the flow between the industrial base now and the department versus the Cold War, which it was department was the idea of factory and push stuff out. We are at an interesting time where we're seeing a lot of technology that solves the 80% solution and then we can hyper focus on what's that 20% edge case because the Arctic is one and we're seeing the exact same things that all of us grew up with, with

• 30:11Speaker 00

  the super heat, super hot environments as well, because the jungle eats batteries just as much, the desert eats batteries. So now we can actually go, okay, the, the commercial industry has solved this really serious 80% problem. The consumer market is making things smaller, more efficient, less expensive. We can now spend taxpayer dollars on those edge cases.

• 30:34Erin Price-Wright?

  Focus the resources on the things that really don't matter in the commercial sector. Yeah, there you go. So maybe switching gears a little bit.

• 30:46Erin Price-Wright?

  I guess more broadly, like how can you talk more about how the Army is modernizing its procurement and tech integration? You've talked about it a little bit, but would love to just, you know, hear your big picture view for how this should work.

• 30:59Speaker 00

  I, yes, I can. And I'm proud of where we've been because a year ago, Justin and Leila and I started, we're sitting here talking about what does acquisition reform look like? What does it mean? And now we're here and I can actually tell you, here's what we've done. So the Army had 13 program executive offices across everything. And then PMs under that, we had research and engineering centers that were disconnected. We had contracting officials that didn't work for the PMs or the PEOs. All of that was separate and they actually lived under different commands. We had Army Futures Command with the labs. All of the PMs lived under the acquisition and logistics and technology chief in the Pentagon. And then the contracting lived under Army Material Command.

• 31:43Speaker 00

  Today, we have six portfolio acquisition executives and our sort of plus one is the pathway to innovation, pathway to innovative technologies, the PIT.

• 31:56Speaker 00

  The contracting officials work for those portfolio executives. The labs report to those portfolio executives. The requirements generators report to those portfolio acquisition executives. So now you really have a portfolio manager who says, here is the current state of what soldiers need in my portfolio. So command and control, protection, fire, sustainment, very big meaty problems.

• 32:17Erin Price-Wright?

  Yep.

• 32:19Speaker 00

  Here are the current efforts that we have underway within the labs that solve some of these problems. Here's what we can cut away because commercial industry is probably going to solve that faster than us. I'll give you an example. We did a, lots of credit to Chris Manning, who was our Deputy Assistant Secretary for Research and Technology and is now the Deputy C2 Portfolio Executive.

• 32:40Speaker 00

  He actually put together a gauge that said, here are sort of the big, big areas that we invest science and technology dollars on. Fires, command and control, energetics, sustainment. And then he also assessed, here are the areas where industry invests their money. And if both of those are invested in, that's probably a mismatch. That means we are wasting dollars that you are going to actually solve way faster than we will. So we can focus on things like energetics and propulsion and things that are super unique to us. That is how we actually thought about next gen command and control. Go fully commercial where you can. That's how we're thinking about some of our next generation fires capabilities, because there's probably not a need for 20 years of government development when we can see very clearly there's companies who have built better, cheaper, faster missiles, or better, less

• 33:25Speaker 00

  complex rockets. I get to watch start SpaceX launches all the time. So that, that is, those are examples of things that we have done, like the acquisition reform is a thing. It is here, it is working within the Army.

• 33:37Erin Price-Wright?

  So, and you, you also mentioned a little bit earlier, this transformation in contact, which is essentially, I mean, you should, you should describe it, actually.

• 33:45Speaker 00

  Okay. It was a, it was a very simple thought from General George, and then immediately signed on with Secretary Driscoll. It was, what if we gave commanders flexibility to organize their units and their equipment for their mission? So generally, the Army, the big green machine, we have the best capability in the world for the things that are unique to us. Like the things that came out of the big five, Patriot, Abrams, Bradley, Blackhawk, Chinook, or Apache. Best things in the world, bar none.

• 34:18Speaker 00

  However, that can't be the norm for everything where commercial industry is going to go faster. So we said, what if we saturate these units, give them so much stuff, to the point where it's probably going to break them, they're not going to be able to try everything all the time. And then what if we let them tell us what's working and what's not, and then organize themselves with the formation and the technology to be the best, most lethal organization they can be. So we started with 2nd Brigade 101st down at Fort Campbell, 2nd Brigade 25th in the Pacific in Hawaii, and then 3rd Brigade 10th Mountain, who is going to Europe. We said, you cover the globe, you're probably going to look and feel different, rather than just trying to field everyone the same thing everywhere, all the time. And then we spent the next 18 months iterating with them.

• 35:03Speaker 00

  We expanded a little bit, so I think I've seen Adam at every tick rotation.

• 35:09Speaker 00

  And then we took it to every combined training center that we have. So that's the real crucible where we make units as a unit actually go fight the fight against a living, breathing, thinking OPFOR instead of just what we used to do, which is, hey, it worked in a lab, let's spend the next five years building it and then fielding it out and then hopefully it does in combat what we needed to do. We actually made everyone use their technology. Everyone talks about the things that that work, the things that came out of TIC that were most important for at least me as an advisor to the chief and the secretary is, here are the things that don't work, we should stop doing them, let's not waste more money. Or here are the companies that are really promising, they're not quite there yet, we can give them RUT or guidance.

• 35:51Speaker 00

  Or here are the here are the portfolios of investment that are the most fruitful, let's continue to send them our demand signal because that's what they need to do their job.

• 36:02Erin Price-Wright?

  Yeah. So how do you know that TIC is working? What does it look like? Maybe specific wins or I guess like how do you move from success in within TIC to, you know, a longer, more sustaining, larger contract?

• 36:19Speaker 00

  It's not, it's unevenly distributed.

• 36:22Erin Price-Wright?

  Yeah.

• 36:22Speaker 00

  So I will give you one example for how I know that that TIC is working. So we started with purpose-built, tradable UAS. And now that is something that we are scaling to the army. We started with sort of a vision that not like Ukraine, because we don't fight like Ukraine, but some of the lessons in technology, we definitely want and we should scale it. So what you're going to see here in the next couple of weeks is the UAS marketplace go live. It's live right now, we've got it sort of sequestered off, so we can actually try it, get soldier feedback on it. But that is a way that now companies can get their kit out there and then scale those demand purchases. We know that we used TIC to fix the network and really what that means is rip out a lot

• 37:04Speaker 00

  of the super complex networking stuff that we gave to units. And we allowed them to reorganize and say, this is, this is how it needs to be organized for me to get the data that I need where I need it. And now we're institutionalizing those training or those, those architectural changes. So I know that it's working in in big hairy areas.

• 37:24Speaker 00

  I think if I were a betting man, that you'll see very similar from us on things like autonomy, things like power generation, management, and storage, things like mission autonomy across air and ground and maritime.

• 37:36Erin Price-Wright?

  Mm-hmm.

• 37:37Speaker 00

  So that's, I know that it's working with the things that were really baseline. So I know that it'll work on the things that are much more complex.

• 37:42Erin Price-Wright?

  And so then, I mean, the budgets are still ultimately controlled at the congressional level. So how do you work with Congress to make sure that the long-term budgets line up with your modernization efforts and what you see being important in the field?

• 37:58Speaker 00

  Aggressively. I think, I think last year I talked about a concept called flexible, flexible funding or agile funding. We worked, we worked with all of the committees and in the 26 budget, we were able to get some of our budget line item consolidation. Having those portfolios executive is, is as an arbiter of what their budgets look like also helps because now you have a portfolio of things instead of multiple different efforts. And those portfolio executives can make trades with them.

• 38:28Erin Price-Wright?

  They can trade off, yeah.

• 38:29Speaker 00

  They can make trades on requirements, they can make trades on, on systems, they can make opportunity cost trades where, hey, maybe we get an 80% solution, you know, 30 days from now instead of 100% solution years from now. And then what you'll see in the Army's budget, without giving away numbers, because that's how I get tackled on the streets, is, is we will continue to be aggressive about BLI consolidation in 27 and program element consolidation, but also doing the simple things that like, nobody cares about, except us here in Washington, making sure that our J-books are, are not so specific that we lock ourselves in, making sure that our P and R forms are, are, talk about the thing, the capabilities that we need, not the stuff that we're buying.

• 39:10Erin Price-Wright?

  Yeah.

• 39:11Speaker 00

  Because then, as new companies come online, as new capabilities become real, that gives us flexibility to try them immediately, rather than having to waiting, having to wait another Palm cycle, which was what we did, you know, two or three years ago.

• 39:25Erin Price-Wright?

  Yeah, yeah. So maybe zooming out again a little bit, you know, thinking, thinking towards the future and power and, you know, the future of warfare.

• 39:37Erin Price-Wright?

  I'd love to talk a little bit, like, one of the big risks in power and energy, in particular batteries, is how much of our battery supply chain comes from China. And China is currently beating us on battery production, production costs, and many of the downstream industries like EVs, drones, grid storage, et cetera. So how big is the gap? Is this something that the Army is thinking about? How do we close it? And how do we bring these supply chains closer to the US?

• 40:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, just a simple question.

• 40:08Erin Price-Wright?

  No, no big deal.

• 40:09Speaker 00

  No, so we are. So one of the under-understood components of the Army is our organic industrial base. It's 23 depots and arsenals and factories across the United States that were built during World War II and have been running ever since as a strategic reserve for the nation. So the Army builds all the ammunition. We repair radars and combat vehicles, and we have the added manufacturing center of excellence. So that is a strategic reserve that the Army has. So as we think through battery production, there's been two big pushes. So NDA 26 had investments in battery cells. So that's massive.

• 40:54Speaker 00

  And then the undersecretary of War for Industrial-Based Policy is also making big investments, coupled with the Department of Energy. And how do we onshore manufacturing of battery cells? Super, super exciting, because you're looking at, you know, across just IBP, Industrial-Based Policy, and the Department of Energy, you're looking at almost $300 million of investment. And then you're also looking at, you know, an additional couple hundred million of investment area that the Department of War is looking at for battery cell production, which turns into battery manufacturing, which turns into upstream rare earth mineral manufacturing, productization, metallization, and then making it available so that companies can pull it into their supply chains.

• 41:38Speaker 00

  So yes, your Army is looking at how do we do that? And we are also trying to make sure that the Department And industry and the rest of the federal government understand here is the demand signal because we will, we will absolutely consume these things. It allows Americans to get upscaled. It allows factories to be stood up for American manufacturing and production and that it tells the American industrial base that there are opportunities that might not have looked like they were available five years ago that will actually be hugely beneficial for the country moving forward. It's not just a, it's not just a drone thing. It's not just a, you know, toy problem thing. It is really, this actually solves America's problems, not just the Department of War's problems.

• 42:22Erin Price-Wright?

  Yeah. I'd be curious to get your perspective as well and how you're thinking about your supply chains, particularly on the, on the battery end, but you know, more broadly across, across the product.

• 42:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, and we, we really kind of see our position as, you know, kind of that, that next level down from, from the department where we're delivering an end product and end solution. And so we can also kind of, you know, using the demand signal from the department for our products can go pass that on to our suppliers and our supply chain as well. And we can say, hey, the, you know, the department is probably the highest willingness to pay kind of per kilowatt hour for these systems, you know, versus kind of consumer commercial type applications. And doing that reshoring is going to take, you know, going to take investment, right? Those first hundred, those first thousand, right, are going to be more expensive than the equivalent from China. But what we can do is we can say, hey, we will kind of help you get down that cost curve because we're able to say, hey, we can

• 43:15Speaker 01

  go and take that and deploy it into kind of the, the most demanding application, right? That has the most demanding supply chain requirements. And we can kind of act as kind of an off take agreement, kind of for, for those companies. And, you know, I think a lot about, you know, reading kind of Freedom's Forge and thinking about how do we kind of re-industrialize, right? And how do we kind of compete in this economic domain against China? And it's not by, by trying to out China, China, right? It's like, what do we do great here, which is capitalism, right? Incentives. It's, it's, it's the government as a customer, right? Not the government as an investor. And so we kind of really see opportunities to take the demand signal to sell those products into the department and then say, hey, if you're buying, if you're building cells in the U.S., we will buy those cells. We will buy those first thousand cells to help you get down that initial cost curve

• 44:00Speaker 01

  because we have a customer, right? Who, who has the highest demand for that in a way that, you know, prevents the government from having to go buy lithium and then figure out, okay, what do I do with all this lithium, right? Like we sell a product that goes directly to that end user, but can help kind of provide. That demand signal to those US companies trying to reshore. The other thing that we think about really in the supply chain space is focusing on those end items or those kind of mid-middle of the value chain items where there's a lot of focus, a lot of discussion right at the national level at the White House about critical minerals, right about cells, refining, mining. But where we actually see some of the biggest risks in supply chain are actually these end items where soldiers are going to Home Depot and buying, you know, these Chinese battery banks to fill a gap around power.

• 44:44Speaker 01

  Systems that are Wi-Fi connected, right? Systems that could be backdoored, right? From a communications perspective, could even be shorted out in terms of their BMS and turned into remotely triggerable IED. And so we see a lot of kind of the supply chain and really trying to drive the supply chain discussion, not just into those inputs, but into those end items. And it all kind of has to work together cohesively.

• 45:03Erin Price-Wright?

  So maybe last question then. If you could define success for tactical power modernization 24 months from now, if that's the right timeframe, what would soldiers actually feel is different? Coming back to the warfighter.

• 45:21Speaker 00

  I'll tell you a story. Hopefully it supports the answering question. So I went to, I had an opportunity to go to a THAAD battery and I will not say where it is, even though they are decisively engaged right now. And they were rebuilding, they, these fire soldiers, were rebuilding three KW generators by hand because the adapters were fouled. The guts had basically worn out and they needed them to make sure they had continuity of operations. And the question that we asked was, why are you rebuilding this? Three K is nothing. Go, let's go find some. And they went, we would love that.

• 46:05Speaker 00

  We would love that flexibility to just go buy a 5K generator and just have it here. And we weren't doing that for them. So we've solved that problem, but 24 months from now, that problem shouldn't exist. Now, it's going to take time to get, you know, everywhere for the entire army, but we should be able to. Either have some type of dismounted solid state battery that's tactical microgrid compliant. We should have some type of solid state generator that's tactical microgrid compliant, or we should have something like the infantry squad vehicle heavy, where it's a vehicle that actually is able to put out power that is tactical microgrid compliant. That allows everyone to know, here is the way that you build your interfaces,

• 46:51Speaker 00

  just like we did with software APIs forever. Here is the way that you serve your power. Here is the way that you have to hook up to, so you can give it to us. And that standard should be no more cumbersome to any company than us saying, hey, your software has to have APIs. If we can do that, I think a lot of the problems that soldiers have today go away and they get to ask second order questions like, how light can we make this? How, what are the other interesting ways that I can employ this? How can I actually power my robotic warfare company? How can I actually power my tactical UAS platoon and their batteries? So that they're not in a hide site with two generators powering six different types of UAS batteries.

• 47:36Speaker 00

  Some of them are super slow trickle charge because the cells are smart. Some of them are very fast charged because the cells are dumb. I think a lot of those problems become much more transparent and we can actually start solving harder problems.

• 47:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I'll bring it full circle to kind of the outcomes focus, right? And again, Cherry, not really liking to talk about our products, but liking to talk about what we enable. And we want to blend in as this just infrastructure layer. Kind of similar thing with NextGen C2, right? It's just like, everything communicates, right? Everything is shared, there's no silos. You don't need that individual soldier on the ground to be an expert on networks or an expert on radios or an expert on how to configure and dial in this particular radio. It's, you know, I plug something into the network and immediately that sensor, all of its data is available to the people who need it. We want to be that kind of same layer for power where it is transparent, right? It's not something that you have to think about. Significantly, you can think about, how do I deliver effects, right? How do I be more lethal? How do I be more survivable? How do I hide?

• 48:32Speaker 01

  What, how do I use this to operate longer without resupply? And so that's really where we're focused is. And we've seen some really wins there. We had a brigade commander, you drop this into his vehicle. Last year at the same exercise was driving these Home Depot Chinese battery banks back to the 10K generator and swapping them out the whole time. His XO was constantly doing math on like, okay, when is this thing going to be dead? When do we need to drop it back? We dropped ours in this time, plugged it into the vehicle, and now power was not a thought. And now that bandwidth, that operational kind of command and control bandwidth was focused on mission objectives, not, hey, where am I going to charge my battery next?

• 49:14Speaker 01

  So that's really kind of, I think, if we succeed in 24 months, right? Actually, nobody talks about power because it just works. It just works.

• 49:22Erin Price-Wright?

  We're on to the next bottleneck.

• 49:23Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 49:24Erin Price-Wright?

  Cool. Well, thank you both so much. This was really fun.

• 49:26Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 49:29Erik Torenberg?

  Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z Podcast. If you liked this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or review, and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes, go to YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. Follow us on X at A16Z and subscribe to our Substack at A16Z.substack.com. Thanks again for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode. As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. Please note that A16Z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the companies discussed in

• 50:13Erik Torenberg?

  this podcast. For more details, including a link to our investments, please see A16Z.com/disclosures.