All Quiet on the Second Front

Most AI being built for the military assumes a steady connection to a data center. In a contested fight, that connection is one of the first things to go. Jason Rathje has spent a decade building new ways for commercial companies and capital to reach national security, and now he’s building AI that runs on the devices soldiers already carry. He joins Tyler to talk about designing AI from the edge up, and what the defense tech market looks like after ten years of change.

What's happening on the second front:

• Why local-first architecture wins when power, latency, and connectivity are the real constraints
• How small, mission-tuned models for comms, intel, and fires can work together like a fire team
• What a peer-to-peer AI mesh makes possible when there’s no central service to call back to
• Why talent follows capital, and how new government financing tools changed the math on hard tech
• The case for keeping dual use, critical minerals, and the industrial base in the national security conversation

Jason is President of Public Sector at webAI and the founding director of the DOW’s Office of Strategic Capital, and previously ran AFWERX’s AFVentures program after six years as an Air Force engineer.

Harvard offers a course called Doing Business with China. As Nick Maynes points out, there is no course for doing business with America. Meanwhile, students across Harvard and MIT are building sensors, AI, and manufacturing tech with real national security applications, and most of them have never thought of the government as a customer or a partner.

Nick and Ryan Holte started QLab to close that distance. They join Tyler Sweatt to talk about finding dual-use founders before those founders know they are dual-use, funding them without taking equity, and teaching technical builders how to sell to the government and to investors.

• Why QLab takes zero equity and funds founders with non-dilutive grants so they build full time instead of taking a summer internship
• The first perception barrier every student founder has to get past, and what national security companies actually look like: cyber, manufacturing, critical minerals
• How to keep one demanding early customer from pulling a product into a niche that won’t scale
• Why technical founders get about 30 seconds to make an investor curious, and how to translate SBIR wins into de-risking
• Building for America across administrations, and why national security has to stay bipartisan

Buying satellite imagery used to take a year of contract negotiations, and the images still arrived as PDFs. SkyFi launched in 2023 to simplify the process and had users in 180 countries within two weeks.

By the time government customers came calling, the product was already battle-tested by commercial users, ready for a market that rarely gives second chances.

This week, Luke Fischer, a 20-year Army veteran, former special ops aviator, and now SkyFi co-founder, joins Sam Gray to share what he's learned building a dual-use company commercial-first.

• Leveraging your commercial base to show up ready for the gov
• Why a continuing resolution can make a dual-use company more attractive to investors
• What happens when warfighters, not leadership, do the selling
• Staying competitive with AI as a small company

Connect with Luke

• LinkedIn: Luke Fischer

Connect with Sam 

• LinkedIn: Sam Gray

Roughly $100 billion a year goes into federal IT, and by GAO’s count about 80% of it goes to maintaining old, complex legacy code bases. As AI speeds up everything built around them, those code bases become the thing the whole enterprise waits on. Jake Sortor ran into this himself as an intelligence officer in Iraq, trying to get a Python script he'd written tested on a secure network. He leads public sector at Blitzy now, and his argument is that AI is the only thing that attacks a backlog this size — with humans still making every decision that matters.

What's happening on the second front:

• Why maintaining legacy code, not model capability, is the ceiling on government software speed
• What “human in the lead” actually looks like when 80–90% of the development lifecycle is automated
• The case that automation turns developer work into judgment — architecture, deployment, configuration — rather than eliminating it
• Why state and local government may be the most underserved and most transferable market in modernization
• What Jake learned teaching himself Python downrange in Iraq to fix a clunky Excel workflow, and the heat he took for it

Jake Sortor is a former Air Force intelligence officer who taught economics at the Air Force Academy, went on to a JD/MBA and a year in corporate law, and now leads public sector at Blitzy while continuing to serve in the reserves.

Connect with Jake

• LinkedIn: Jake Sortor

Connect with Tyler

• LinkedIn: Tyler Sweatt

In 2020, telling people that organized actors were using bots to shape what the public believes got you called a conspiracy theorist. 

The one audience that didn't need convincing was the national security community, which had been thinking about the battle for perception long before it had a commercial market.

Now, the problem has a name — cognitive warfare — and it has changed shape. The target is no longer the information environment. It is cognition itself, and AI has collapsed the cost of attacking it. Blackbird CEO Wasim Khaled returns to All Quiet to walk through what narrative attacks look like now, who is actually getting hit, and why monitoring the problem was never the mission.

What’s happening on the Second Front: 

• Why “misinformation” and fact-checking became the wrong frame, and what narrative intelligence replaced them with
• What AI did to the economics of a narrative attack — from troll farms to autonomous agents, and from “where are the bots?” to “where are the people?”
• Who gets targeted now: members of Congress, CEOs, even shareholder votes — not just the credulous
• Why most platforms stop between observe and orient, and what it takes to close the loop through decide and act
• Prediction that isn’t fortune-telling, it’s reducing the number of futures that can surprise you

Wasim Khaled is co-founder and CEO of Blackbird.AI, whose Constellation platform helped define the narrative intelligence category; a computer scientist by training, he built and scaled an Inc. 500 company before turning to information warfare.

Connect with Wasim

• LinkedIn: Wasim Khaled

Connect with Tyler

• LinkedIn: Tyler Sweatt

Twenty years ago, a young logistics lieutenant solved an impossible field problem with a Franklin Planner, a satellite phone, and a contact who happened to be at his desk. It worked — but it ran on luck. Bill Pessin has spent his career since making sure the mission never has to. He joins Tyler Sweatt to trace the line from Army logistics to leading Salesforce’s Missionforce, and why acceleration, not just speed, is the point.

What's happening on the Second Front:

• How a satellite phone and a Franklin Planner solved an impossible field problem — and why depending on luck is a system failure
• Why Salesforce is the “central nervous system” of the mission enterprise, from HUMINT to workflow
• How Missionforce was born from a single dinner between Marc Benioff and a combatant commander
• What “acceleration” really means when moving faster through the mission is the goal, not the metric
• The one piece of government friction he’d fix first if he had a magic wand

Bill Pessin is SVP of Missionforce at Salesforce and a U.S. Army veteran who has led the company’s national security business since 2014.

• Connect with Bill: https://www.linkedin.com/in/billpessin/
• Connect with Tyler: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tylersweatt

Every veteran gets the same advice on the way out: "your service will speak for itself." It won't. In this episode, Tyler Sweatt sits down with Kyle Eberly, Wyatt Frasier, and Max Cormier, the leadership team behind Sitreps — the recruiting firm that's become the go-to clearinghouse for veteran talent in defense tech and private equity — to give it to transitioning service members straight.

They cover:

• Why civilian employers care about value and dependability, not your combat record — and how to lead with that
• The difference between "signal" and "human capital," and why vets almost always need the former
• Whether an MBA is still worth it (and why "getting an MBA on YouTube" is a trap)
• The negotiation and entitlement mistakes that cost people offers at the one-yard line

Connect with the Sitreps Team:

• Wyatt Frasier, CEO
• Kyle Eberly, Chairman and CTO
• Max Cormier, COO

Connect with Tyler:

• LinkedIn: Tyler Sweatt

A foreign partner's payment has sat in a U.S. government account for nearly a year. The order still hasn't shipped. It's stuck in contracting. That kind of friction is exactly what Church Hutton, Chief Growth Officer at AV, has spent his career navigating: from Senate Armed Services and Appropriations staff, to Army Reserve officer, to leading growth at a company that just doubled in size by acquiring Blue Halo.

Tyler and Church dig into:

• Why "cost per effect" is broken — the U.S. is shooting down $20K threats with million-dollar interceptors
• Why laser weapon systems are finally moving from prototype to production after decades of false starts
• The historical parallel between the Army's interwar cavalry branch and today's Pentagon modernization fights

__________

Church Hutton has spent over two decades moving between Capitol Hill, uniformed service, and defense industry leadership, most recently steering growth at AV through its transformation into a full-spectrum autonomous systems company.

Connect with Church

• LinkedIn: Church Hutton

Connect with Tyler

• LinkedIn: Tyler Sweatt

Breaking into aviation as a startup means years of quiet, brutal work with nothing to show for it publicly. Zach Shore calls it startups on hard mode: the pain is real, but the moat is massive.

Now Hermeus is the fastest company in history from founding to supersonic flight, and its newly minted CEO sits down with Tyler to explain how a small team out-built a 75-year-old industry.

• "Own the outcome, not the action" — the whole job of leadership at scale
• Why adding sales headcount early creates crosscurrents, not coverage
• 74 days from build stand to weight on wheels, and why building more planes makes you faster
• Keeping your mouth shut as go-to-market strategy in a zero-sum budget world

Zach Shore is the CEO of Hermeus, a former Marine SIGINT officer and Anduril early employee who led the Lattice program before joining Hermeus to build its go-to-market motion from scratch.

Connect with Zach

• LinkedIn: Zach Shore

Connect with Tyler 

• LinkedIn: Tyler Sweatt

Getting AI out of the POC and into production has been the defining challenge of the last three years. Brian Raymond has lived it from the inside — building infrastructure, mistiming bets, and figuring out in real time what "enterprise-ready" actually requires.

This episode covers:

• What it takes to get AI out of the demo and into production at scale
• Why senior engineering judgment matters more than headcount in the AI era
• How Unstructured crossed the Valley of Death without forking their stack — same core code base on Game Warden and in financial services
• What a decade at CIA taught Brian about paranoia as a leadership practice
• Why the dam may have finally broken on enterprise AI adoption

Brian Raymond is CEO and co-founder of unstructured.io, an AI data infrastructure company with $65M raised, 70M open source downloads, and customers spanning financial services, defense, and enterprise SaaS.

Connect with Brian:

• LinkedIn: Brian Raymond

Connect with Tyler:

• LinkedIn: Tyler Sweatt