Micro Journeys: The Pulse of What’s Next

In this episode of Micro Journeys Inside Access, host Daniel Marrujo catches up with Odaro Huckstep, Director of Defense Engagement at Colorado State University (CSU), to talk about the university's engagement at African Lion 2026.

Odaro explains how CSU is working to bridge academic research with fielded military work using the university's drone research center. He walks us through the university's Rapid Prototyping Lab and shares how the facility and drone center are already supporting SETAF-AF's interests.

The conversation also digs into the "Valley of Death," and the challenge of getting new systems fielded. What used to be a stall point has shifted with many of the roadblocks cleared. CSU initiatives are at the forefront of that shift. By embedding researchers directly in field exercises like African Lion, it's moving technology from concept to warfighter faster than ever before.

What You'll Discover in This Episode:

• [00:43] How Odaro and the defense engagement department at Colorado State University are aligning campus research with national security priorities.
• [01:53] Odaro introduces Chris Robertson and John Mizia and explains how together they’re bringing drone center and Rapid Prototyping Lab expertise to CTAF.
• [05:14] How Colorado State is working toward rapid prototyping capability that could reach the tactical edge via C-130.
• [10:07] The drone application ranges and how the CSU research team is harnessing the technology for either search and rescue or combat missions,
• [12:11] Programs like SBIR, STTR, STRATFI, and TACFI are shortening the "Valley of Death" challenge by bridging research funding and fielded technology.
• [19:53] The importance of the CSU team field testing in Morocco at African Lion.

• Daniel Marrujo

Learn more about TSS: https://tss.llc/micro-journeys-podcast/

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In this episode of Micro Journeys Inside Access, host Daniel Marrujo speaks with Private First Class David Pomeroy, 173rd Airborne Brigade, U.S. Army at African Lion 2026 about an amazing piece of technology they are developing to keep soldiers out of harm’s way while breaching a difficult situation. Throughout the conversation, PFC Pomeroy explains how the unit built an off-road drone, detailing the design and intended functionality.

The episode dives into the drone’s capabilities and explains how, when paired with autonomous vehicles, it can help soldiers in a tough spot. With this innovative tech, PFC Pomeroy’s team hopes to eliminate operator risk and operator faults to keep soldiers out of the breach and safe.

The prototype design hinges on advancing technology and basic principles. Built on a repurposed RC car with a 3D-printed frame and rail system, the device is designed to carry explosive charges to a wire obstacle, allowing soldiers to conduct a breach from a safe distance. The RC car serves as the base that holds the 3D-printed railings and their connectors. Right now, the device is best suited for mechanized units and still needs manual operation. but the idea is to mass-produce the drones and send them out on separate missions.

What You'll Discover in This Episode:

• [00:53] David Pomeroy introduces the drone and explains its functionality and intended purpose.
• [01:22] Pomeroy and Dan talk about the drone’s design, highlighting the RC car and 3D-printed Picatinny rail.
• [02:22] Pomeroy explains where the drone can be used how it can help mechanized units or people with Humvees.
• [03:14] Pomeroy discusses how the drone could eventually work alongside other autonomous and unmanned systems observed during African Lion 2026.
• [03:39] The Army is adapting with new technologies using drones and unmanned vehicles in diverse environments.
• [04:05] Pomeroy explains that AI isn’t taking jobs from soldiers; it’s enhancing their safety with autonomous solutions.

• Daniel Marrujo

Learn more about TSS: https://tss.llc/micro-journeys-podcast/

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In this episode of Micro Journeys, host Daniel Marrujo speaks with Lieutenant General Milford H. Beagle, Jr. (U.S. Army, Retired) to discuss his book, When the Map Runs Out, his 35-year Army career capped by command of the Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, and the leadership lessons he carried throughout it all. Drawing on his experiences, he unpacks what it takes to become a leader and what it means to follow when uncertainty is inevitable. He tells Dan about his time at Ranger School, his experience serving two tours with the 10th Mountain Division, and the coaching work he’s doing post-retirement.

When Dan asks about the inspiration behind his book, Lt. Gen. Beagle, Jr. (Ret.) explains his passion for leadership and the desire to speak on it from a different perspective. He shares a pattern he observed while commanding at Fort Leavenworth that led him to realize just how many senior officers were struggling with uncertainty. He compared their experience to a map running out, explaining that when plans and frameworks stop matching the terrain in front of the leader, deeper problems arise.

The map metaphor became the foundation of his book. Throughout its pages, he shares his solution for finding clarity and the tools leaders need to move forward: leaning on peers, staying honest, and anchoring decisions to purpose rather than rank or title.

What You'll Discover in This Episode

• [02:29] — The pattern of leading in uncertainty despite decades of combat experience that inspired the book
• [11:02] — A single 40-minute conversation with a battalion commander early in his career taught Lt. Gen. Beagle, Jr. (Ret.) that leadership happens in moments, not rank
• [17:22] — Leading at scale, from a 30-person platoon to a 1,200-person battalion, forced a shift from doing everything personally to building trust in a team
• [39:37] — Why his focus post-retirement is combining 35 years of practitioner experience with a doctorate-level academic perspective to help leaders find clarity in uncertainty
• [44:44] — The Army's next leadership challenge is preparing leaders to integrate AI into decision-making as organizational complexity accelerates
• [47:00] — Lt. Gen. Beagle, Jr. (Ret.) argues AI can't be fully compartmentalized

Let's Connect

• Daniel Marrujo

Learn more about TSS: https://tss.llc/micro-journeys-podcast/

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The Micro Journeys Inside Access podcast continues its live coverage at African Lion 2026. This time, host Daniel Marrujo chats with Lieutenant Colonel Vernon Logan - SETAF-AF Communications Directorate, to learn more about the communication efforts behind the event and AFRICOM.

People tend to think of a communications team as the guys with the cell phones or the satellite communications. But as Col. Logan shares, there’s so much more to it behind the scenes. The team at SETAFserves as the communications backbone for everything happening at African Lion. From cellular coverage to satellite communications, he reveals just how much planning goes into keeping thousands of participants connected across Morocco.

Along with technologies like drones, surveillance, and reconnaissance, the SETAF team is responsible for network protection, ensuring everyone, on-site and beyond, remains connected. As the conversation deepens, he walks through details, such as the tools used to map cellular coverage, the growing role of satellite communications like Starlink, and the push toward next-generation capabilities—quantum, encryption, and interoperable systems—needed to keep pace with partners across Africa and Europe. They even discuss the humble side of communication, how real-time translation technology bridges the language gap, and the role cybersecurity plays in protecting everything from radios to email.

What You'll Discover in This Episode

00:53 — Col. Logan explains the team's communications efforts for African Lion 2026

01:25 — Col. Logan shares how the cell phone coverage analysis tool helps planners know exactly where connectivity will and won't exist across Morocco

02:53 — The push for faster, more secure communications is tied directly to the speed of the kill chain

03:34 — Staying ahead of adversaries means investing in future technologies like quantum and advanced encryption while maintaining interoperability with partner nations and on-site team

05:28 — Real-time translation technology converts Arabic or French to English in seconds, transforming coalition communication with Moroccan and African partners

06:54 — Defensive cyber and email security fall under the same communications directorate, protecting the information decision-makers rely on

• Daniel Marrujo

Learn more about TSS: https://tss.llc/micro-journeys-podcast/

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In this episode of Micro Journeys, host Daniel Marrujo is joined by Sergeant Major Patrick Jeffrey, G7 Exercise Sergeant Major for the Southern European Task Force Africa (SETAF-AF), to discuss the Drone Academy program, which provides soldiers with invaluable hands-on experience.

African Lion has presented tons of cool tech, but few have shone as brightly as the drones. This conversation digs into how the Drone Academy helps bring it all to life. Sgt. Maj. Jeffrey explains that the program was designed to be a place where U.S. forces and their African partners could learn about and train with emerging drone technologies. In the five-pillar training program, each exercise mirrors official U.S. Army training standards and is treated as a live testing ground. 

Having the technology does no good if it can’t survive the conditions soldiers face in battle. Scorching desert heat, high altitudes, and long distances can all be adversaries. The Drone Academy puts the technology through it all so that only the most capable systems move forward toward procurement and deployment.

What You'll Discover in This Episode

• [00:36] — The origin of the Drone Academy from General Donahue's idea to becoming one of five pillars in the Africa Multidomain Training and Experimentation Center.
• [02:21] — Why every partner soldier trains against the same program of instruction used for active-duty U.S. Army soldiers.
• [03:40] — Drones are deliberately pushed to failure across desert, forested, high-altitude, and maritime conditions to expose real battery-life and performance limits before procurement.
• [04:35] — An initial field of roughly 220 vendor technologies was narrowed down to 38 pieces of equipment brought to African Lion for live testing.
• [06:37] — How drone employment plans built in the academy's planning courses feed directly into live CJTF mission planning
• [06:58] — The program closes the loop between planning, testing, and training, preparing forces for the next unpredictable deployment 

Let's Connect

• Daniel Marrujo

Learn more about TSS: https://tss.llc/micro-journeys-podcast/

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In this episode of Micro Journeys, host Daniel Marrujo gets a close-up look at Marathon's autonomous robotic targets. Joined by Nate Whelan, Vice President, Europe, Marathon Targets GmbH, he walks through the entire lineup, learning about the robot's build and how it works on the battlefield.

These aren’t your basic bucket of bolts. These live-fire training robots talk, move, and behave just like a real adversary. And that realism is meant to translate directly into lethality for the soldiers training against them. Nate explains what that means for a soldier on the range. The battlefield is constantly changing. Targets move, shooters move, drones fly overhead, and you have to decide in real time whether the subject coming towards you is a friend or foe. The robots are built to deliver the same experience by rushing positions, using unit tactics, and responding when one of their own goes down.

The conversation also touches on how the bots benefit traditional training tactics. Soldiers aren't working with static steel targets. Instead, they're interacting with these mannequins, keeping those playing the opposing force out of harm's way.

What You'll Discover in This Episode:

• [00:29] Nate Whelan, Vice President, Europe, Marathon Targets GmbH, introduces Marathon's autonomous targets and explains what they’re built to do.
• [01:53] Steel targets are stationary and more or less predictable. The robots can pop up anywhere and react to a teammate being killed by attacking harder or retreating.
• [03:04] The robots absorb live fire from 5.56 and 7.62 up to .338, and the 3D mannequin registers whether a round was a headshot, a vital hit, or a near-vital hit.
• [03:31] A command-and-control laptop logs every hit in real time; kill criteria are configurable, and after-action reviews can report figures like 500 rounds fired, 50 hits, 20 kills.
• [04:24] Nate explains why the robots are designed to keep attacking even when it’s been hit; simulated body armor, X-shots-to-kill settings, and resurrection after five seconds keep pressure on the shooter.
• [06:31] Batteries run about eight hours, are recharged during soldiers' meal times, and thermal signatures allow night training when the robots can't be seen with the naked eye.

• Daniel Marrujo

Learn more about TSS: https://tss.llc/micro-journeys-podcast/

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In this episode of Micro Journeys, host Daniel Marrujo sits down with Brigadier General John Lloyd for a thrilling discussion about his 40-year Army career. It begins in Lockport, New York, where 17-year-old Lloyd contacts an Army recruiter unbeknownst to his parents. At the time, he had no idea how impactful that one call would become.

The conversation opens with Lloyd detailing the path that led him from private to general. From basic training to a Cold War assignment in Germany and Desert Storm, he tells Dan about how each shaped his career. Later, he shares stories of three of the most demanding recovery missions of his career: The collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, the submerged M88 in a Lithuanian bog, and the search for two lost soldiers at African Lion 2026 in Morocco, which connected him with Dan. 

Each story shaped his career differently, but the recurring theme of giving families closure is hard to miss. Whether clearing minefields in the Korean DMZ in 1953 or standing on a Moroccan shoreline studying a single cove, Lloyd's work has always been rooted in bringing soldiers home.

What You'll Discover in This Episode

• [01:47] — The newspaper recruiting ad, phone call, and a one-way trip to Fort Leonard Wood that changed Lloyd's life 
• [26:37] — Inside the DMZ demining and joint remains recovery mission at Arrowhead Hill, where ID tags and DNA matching returned fallen soldiers to their countries
• [40:25] — Navy divers descending 20 feet through collapsing mud, an Estonian cadaver dog, and the recovery of the fourth soldier in Lithuania
• [41:01] — Why the Corps of Engineers, not the Navy, led the Francis Scott Key Bridge recovery, and how the channel was cleared in 71 days 
• [48:01] — The cove near Tan-Tan that "kept speaking" to him, and the Air Force pararescue team that found an Army boot at low tide
• [58:32] — Service, grandkids, a house in Florida, and why he'd do all 40 years over again without hesitation

Let's Connect

• Daniel Marrujo

Learn more about TSS: https://tss.llc/micro-journeys-podcast/

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In this episode of Micro Journeys Inside Access, host Daniel Marrujo sits down with Lau Nørgaard, CTO of Sapient Perception, at African Lion 2026 to explore how the company's large-area UAV ISR camera payloads are transforming how the U.S. and its allies map and understand unfamiliar terrain across the African continent. The conversation walks through how Sapient Perception's technology captures massive, high-resolution imagery and processes it in real time, directly inside the drone, to deliver actionable intelligence to warfighters and rescue teams in the field.

The episode dives into a core challenge facing forces operating across the largely unmapped terrain of the African continent: how to build a real understanding of where troops, camps, and logistics can safely be positioned. Traditional UAV camera systems force a tradeoff between zoom and coverage, described as "looking through a straw," where operators can either see fine detail in a narrow area or a wide view with no detail, but not both. Classical large-area mapping solves this offline, but it requires flying a mission, physically retrieving the data, and processing it afterward, a delay that doesn't work when lives are on the line, such as in a search-and-rescue or fast-moving tactical scenario.

The solution centers on large-sensor, high-resolution camera payloads paired with onboard AI inference, processing full, uncompressed image data directly in the payload and transmitting only georeferenced findings, such as vehicles, people, or hazards, back to operators in real time while the aircraft is still in the air.

What You'll Discover in This Episode:

• 02:08 — Lau Nørgaard's introduction to Sapient Perception's large-area UAV ISR payload technology, mapping large areas in real time rather than in post-processed still images
• 03:19 — The cameras' use of large CMOS sensors, technology previously reserved for still-camera mapping applications, now adapted for real-time drone use
• 05:01 — AI inference running directly on the payload at the edge, keeping sensitive customer-trained AI models fully air-gapped and encrypted from Sapient Perception itself
• 07:43 — A live screen walkthrough of how findings are geo-referenced and displayed as standardized NATO-style icons on ATAK-style mapping software used by soldiers in the field
• 09:17 — How real-time, uncompressed data delivery removes the lag of traditional mapping workflows, giving decision-makers the timely information needed to protect lives and adapt to dynamic mission conditions

Let's Connect

• Dan Marrujo
• TSS Website

Learn more about TSS: https://tss.llc/micro-journeys-podcast/

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Daniel Marrujo returns to Brookhaven National Laboratory for the second day of a two-day Micro Journeys deep dive, this time heading into the lab's quantum networking facility with a panel of the world's leading experts in the field. Associate Laboratory Director Gabriella Carini, staff scientists Soumyajit Mandal, Julián Martínez-Rincón & Paul Stankus, and research scientists Sven Herrman & Prashansa Mukim walk through Brookhaven's real-world quantum network test bed, a 161-mile system with five nodes spanning Long Island, Stony Brook University, Brooklyn, and Columbia University. The episode moves from entangled photons and the physics of quantum communication, to free-space telescope links capable of transmitting single photons through open air, to custom-built microelectronics engineered for the most extreme environments on Earth, and finally to a NASA-led mission searching for the universe's earliest, darkest chapter from the far side of the moon.

At the center of the conversation is a fundamental limitation of classical networks: information sent as digital bits can be intercepted, copied, and manipulated without detection. Quantum communication solves this differently because a quantum state is destroyed the moment it's measured, any attempt to eavesdrop is inherently detectable. But building a real, long-distance quantum network comes with steep physical costs. Photons are lost over distance in fiber, entanglement can't simply be "boosted" the way a classical signal can, and demonstrating true quantum repeaters, the technology needed to extend range without breaking entanglement, has never been done at scale.

Brookhaven's answer is a working test bed that generates, swaps, and routes entangled photons across real commercial infrastructure, paired with free-space telescope links and next-generation microelectronics built to operate in environments as inhospitable as liquid nitrogen temperatures and deep space, laying the groundwork for what researchers describe as an unhackable "quantum internet."

What You'll Discover in This Episode

[02:02] Gabriella Carini explains how Brookhaven's quantum networking program began with the National Quantum Initiative Act and a chance meeting with a Stony Brook physicist

[11:18] Julian Martinez details the live 161-mile quantum network test bed connecting Brookhaven, Stony Brook, and New York City

[13:11] The non-cloning theorem explains why quantum information can't simply be copied or amplified like a classical signal

[21:15] A telescope built not to capture images, but to send single photons through open air as part of a free-space quantum link

[28:39] Why quantum secure communication is described as the "killer application" of quantum networking

[39:50] A NASA-led mission places a radio telescope on the far side of the moon to listen for signals from the universe's earliest, darkest era

Let’s Connect

• Daniel Marrujo
• Gabriella Carini
• TSS Website

Learn more about TSS: https://tss.llc/micro-journeys-podcast/

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In this episode of Micro Journeys Inside Access, host Daniel Marrujo sits down with Benjamin Fowl, Head of Growth for Wild West Systems, at African Lion 2026 to examine a compact drone weapons platform designed to be small, fast, and difficult to detect or shoot down. The conversation covers the system's platform-agnostic design, its field-tested integration with the 173rd Airborne Brigade, and the mechanics of how the drone fires, aims, and returns to base for reuse.

The episode dives into a core challenge facing forces operating in complex terrain: how to deliver a kinetic capability that is lightweight, reusable, and adaptable to the platform a unit already has on hand, without requiring heavy logistics to get the system into and out of theater. Fowl explains how a 3D-printed mounting rail allowed the 173rd to adapt the weapon system to a drone they brought from Italy, going from a modified CAD file to a field-ready mount in under 24 hours.

The solution centers on a platform-agnostic weapons payload, built around a Picatinny rail, that can be swapped between reconnaissance and kinetic missions and refined directly through feedback from the soldiers using it in the field.

What You'll Discover in This Episode:

• [00:25] Daniel introduces the small drone from Wild West Systems, highlighting its compact form factor, low detectability, and ability to fire live rounds.
• [01:32] Benjamin Fowl explains the platform-agnostic design and how the weapon system was mounted on a UAS the 173rd brought from Italy.
• [02:08] The field-printing process is broken down: a modified CAD file, an overnight 3D print, and a next-morning mount that sent the system downrange.
• [03:21] Fowl details the modular Picatinny rail system, allowing units to swap between reconnaissance payloads and the reusable, non-attritable weapons payload — including a magazine-fed version for multiple shots.
• [04:16] The munition itself is described as equivalent to a nine millimeter round, functioning as a recoilless rifle with an internal propellant ignited by a spark.
• [04:44] Fowl explains the current aiming method using a laser, with gimbal-based targeting planned for future versions.

Let’s Connect

• Daniel Marrujo
• Benjamin Fowl
• TSS Website

Learn more about TSS: https://tss.llc/micro-journeys-podcast/

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