The Startup Defense

Asymmetric Innovation, Non-traditional Defense Contractors, and Nautilus with Graham Plaster

• Callye Keen • Season 1 • Episode 40

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In this episode of Startup Defense, host Callye Keen welcomes Graham Plaster, the Director of Nautilus at Defensewerx. Graham discusses his passion for bridging the gap between American innovators and warfighters, sharing insights into his journey from the military to defense innovation. He explains how his background and entrepreneurial spirit led him to play a pivotal role in fostering collaboration between the tech world and the defense sector.

Key Topics:

  • Introduction to Graham Plaster:
    • Graham's background in the military and his entrepreneurial roots.
    • His current role at DefenseWerx and his focus on innovation in the defense sector.
  • Bridging the Gap:
    • The challenges of connecting innovators with the defense sector.
    • The importance of closing the gap between tech innovators and warfighters.
  • Innovating for Defense:
    • Differences between innovating around a problem and innovating around a capability.
    • The impact of asymmetrical warfare on defense innovation.
    • The role of the 9/11 Commission Report in shaping modern defense strategies.
  • Defense Works and Nautilus:
    • Overview of Defensewerx and its various partnership intermediary agreements (PIAs).
    • The role of Nautilus in accelerating access to non-traditional companies.
    • Collaboration with other government agencies and military organizations.
  • Key Technology Areas:
    • Importance of hypersonic countermeasures and cyber defense.
    • Emerging threats and the need for innovative solutions in defense.
  • Component Repair Center Collaboration Event:
    • The initiative to improve on-demand part manufacturing for military needs.
    • The potential impact on the defense industrial complex.
  • Advice for Innovators:
    • The concept of dual market technology.
    • The importance of human terrain in innovation ecosystems.
    • Encouragement for emerging tech startups to engage with defense-focused organizations.

Quotes:

  • “Innovation ecosystems are a human terrain.” - Graham Plaster
  • “Run fast and build things.” - Graham Plaster

Resources:

Connect with Graham Plaster:

Connect with Callye Keen:

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Startup Defense. My name is Callie Keene. Today I have Graham Plaster. Now Graham is the Director of Nautilus at DefenseWorks and a lot of other things. But, Graham, before we dive in and talk about your background and what you're doing and how you're supporting defense innovation, what are you passionate about right now?

Speaker 2:

I'm really passionate about closing the gap between American innovators that are building really cool tech and American warfighters and allied warfighters that have problems. There are a myriad of programs to try to get innovation in the door, but it's just a large bureaucratic Byzantine system and a lot of innovators don't even get started because they'd rather stay 100% commercial where they can move faster. So my job is to be an ambassador between those two worlds, between the creative builders and the people who are protecting the country.

Speaker 1:

We're absolutely on the same wavelength there. That's why I was so excited to have you as a guest, because you do so much work in this space whether it's dual use or just getting people excited and I see that in your sub stack. I see that on what you put out on LinkedIn On a big level, what is happening at DefenseWorks with you. But how did you get roped into the defense tech innovation game?

Speaker 2:

Well, I started out in the military, but really I was kind of an entrepreneur in the government because I came from an entrepreneurial family. My father started a business which was successful, and when I went off to the Naval Academy and then into the fleet, I was always interested on the side and to see what I could maybe do in business and.

Speaker 2:

I was a digital native, growing up with the internet, building computers and taking a laptop to school when nobody else had had one and, you know, really interested in in the internet before the internet, getting on CompuServe and AOL and stuff, and, as a kid, staying up all night doing stuff online. So by the time I got to college and Napster was a thing. I was into all of it. I loved all of the tech that was booming. And I think what I like to tell people is I think 9-11 was a catalyst because it created a real demand signal in asymmetrical warfare, and asymmetrical warfare was the type of problem set which was rapid equipping, so let's solve this problem quick, let's do something cheap off the shelf, let's see if we can adapt quickly and be agile. And so it was the kind of war situation which actually and it was the type of war fighter obviously a lot of asymmetrical war and a lot of digital natives who were constantly looking for solutions that were commercial, off the shelf or rapidly fieldable. And so it really changed the nature, I think, of our military industrial complex. We saw a lot of money pumping in after 9-11 and we saw a lot of programs standing up.

Speaker 2:

I'd like to point to the 9-11 commission report, which you know critiqued the whole military complex and said we were too siloed, we had a Cold War mentality that kept everybody compartmentalized, which kept the organizations from talking to each other, which is why we stood up eventually the ODNI, to really knit together the intelligence agencies. But I think on a broader level, across whole of government, there was and has been the inability to coordinate and the inability to collaborate, and so that's why you get little organizations like Defense Works that kind of try to become the glue between those organizations and bring people together. We're what you call a PIA, a Partnership, intermediary Agreement, and I like to really emphasize the word partnership, because in the world of government contracting you have a lot of competition and so it's nice to have nonprofits that are really focused on collaboration and partnerships and building those partnerships. So that's what I do I go out and try to build partnerships and I try to get people connected. I try to get all boats to rise together.

Speaker 1:

I try to get the warfighter connected with a tech solution. I look for win-win-wins For the startups that we would typically support or work with or roping in smart people who don't want to really make the next social media or to-do list app or whatever. They want to solve big problems. This gives them a little larger aperture to get involved in solving big problems, whether that's through Defense Works or Department of Energy. There's just larger opportunities and bigger problems out there than commercial tech generally has available, Something you said.

Speaker 1:

It reminds me of an argument about large organizations and innovation, because large organizations with certainly any DoD entity would qualify for they say they want innovation, would qualify for they say they want innovation, but innovation is inherently very disruptive and so it's hard to ingest technology as a true you're saying digital native or a true technologist, Although you can look at it and say we understand asymmetrical warfare and we understand that in 9-11 or in the context of Ukraine right now, we understand the need for asymmetry and to use technology to stay in front of things. What's your perspective there on that counterbalance? Because, knowing the need there, but then also knowing the problems that are inherent with true innovation or true disruption of how things are done, it is at odds. It is inherently at odds with each other.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I mean, I like to say there's a lot of different threads to pull on there. But I like to say that in government innovation maybe this is true also in commercial but I just like to say there's a spectrum between innovating around a problem and innovating around a capability. So if you're innovating around a problem, that's the rapid equipping stuff, that's the hey, my boots hurt, give me better boots. Innovating around a capability is like hey, we just made open AI, we have generative AI, what can we do with this? This is a capability. Where can it go from here? And so people start just noodling around it and seeing what they can do with it, and so on.

Speaker 2:

The innovation around a problem, which is what asymmetrical war drives you towards. You know, if you're out there and the platform you're using isn't working, you look for a different platform to solve the problem or different sensor to. You know. Read the situation better. If you're in a lab, if you're a DARPA or national laboratory, or if you're a PhD in a cubicle and you've got a great tech in front of you and you're innovating around the capability, then eventually you're going to want to try to figure out how to commercialize that. And then you have to go around and scratch and try to find a market for it. And then that's when you run into that commercial question of is their product market fit for your technology? And plenty of great technologies have gone.

Speaker 2:

The commercial question of what is their product market fit for your technology? And you know plenty of great technologies have gone the way of the dinosaur because they weren't the timing wasn't right. They didn't, you know, hit the market at the right time. But back to the question of Ukraine. Ukraine is doing the things that we did in Afghanistan and Iraq. In a sense, they're creating rapid demand for agile technologies, commercial technologies. We're learning from Ukraine right now in ways that allow us to benefit, how we can improve our acquisition processes or maybe just our approach. But I'm not sure if that really addressed the question you were getting after, so I'll pause there if you want to refine.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, maybe there's a lot of pieces to what I'm asking. It's just interesting working DOD innovation and working with large corporations for innovation. I think there's the sentiment that we should be innovating. It's like that we should be entrepreneurial, but large organizations are very good at sustaining themselves. That's why they don't fall apart, right. And then some primes right now, some primes are getting better and better at sandboxing, releasing venture arms or supporting entrepreneurial organizations ESOs or organizations like DefenseWorks participating and fostering that growth and fostering that growth. Large organizations in and of themselves they're by design should not or and cannot be innovative, because true innovation is very agile and disruptive and that's the antithesis of a large organization. So I'm always curious when I have somebody like yourself, who you have all of these different bits of information.

Speaker 1:

So I get to pick your brain, like picking John Ferry's brain or Larson Jensen's brain, who have seen this across big organizations inside outside. It's like we all want to improve right, we all want to do better, and continual improvement, or Kaizen, is a thing, but when we look at a net new problem like what we're seeing right now, if I'm Lockheed, I'm really good at building big things and keeping the organization together and high quality and fielding those and sustaining those. I just want to get everybody's perspective on what innovation means in the context of some of the largest organizations and most complex organizations on earth.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I think that's a great question. I think within the large organizations, innovation comes down to culture and it's very tempting to get decadent in large organizations because you know as you get more cash coming in, you want to take care of your people and then you can like veer off of your mission. But if you look at Lockheed, for instance, you have Skunk Works. If you have a culture internally where you empower some innovators to run fast and I won't say run fast and break things, that was the Facebook motto, but run fast and build things Maybe we should put that one on a defense innovation mug as run fast and build things. But the point is that our primes have been very innovative and the fact that they're putting these venture arms together means that they want to stay in the innovation game and the funds that they publish for those corporate venture arms are small compared to what they actually have available to put forward if they really want to build something and do something unique. Now I will say that when a large prime becomes cumbersome, what do they do? They shed, they spin off subsidiaries or they divest, and that's probably a healthy thing.

Speaker 2:

In disruption theory, we talk about companies that become so big that the small, scrappy, innovative company can come and disrupt them and that can be a very destabilizing thing to the military-industrial complex. If we want stability, if we're going to war, we want companies to be able to deliver on time, not be constantly disrupting each other. On the other hand, if we're fighting this year's war with last year's technology, or World War III with World War II technology, then we need to be disrupted. We need to have new platforms proposed and then built and then funded, and so the large corporations do need to have some disruption, but we need to have like a stable disruptive process. You know, and that's why we've had this whole concept of the last supper and the first breakfast I know Enduro and Palantir have been blogging about that stuff the idea that there's been a consolidation of a lot of defense contractors into a few Are you still being recorded as we look to great power conferences with China?

Speaker 2:

The types of technologies that we really need to source are very different than what we were dealing with in the past. So it would be tempting to, like I said, innovate around a capability and say, oh, what's new? We've got to use whatever's new. But we really need to look toward the nature of the conflict and honestly I think that the nature of the conflict is mostly going to be Cold War type things. It's going to be economic, it's going to be proxy, it's going to be sensors. You know, it's going to be a lot of things that are relatively large and complex.

Speaker 1:

Interesting. Yeah, like adjacent to that, what do you feel are some of the more interesting or important technology areas around defense tech right now?

Speaker 2:

I mean.

Speaker 2:

I think, other than just saying AI, no, no, I mean AI is an interesting one to include in a lot of other things, I think, hypersonic countermeasures. So if you think about Iron Dome, iron Beam kind of approach to dealing with extremely fast missiles. If you look at what Iran did with Israel with the drone attack and how Israel was able to see them coming from hours away and shoot down 99% of them, then you have to think, okay, well, what are the actual risks with drone swarms? I think if you know, hypothetically, if you were to do a drone swarm off of a coast of a continent that was very near and on a civilian population, that could be very dangerous if they didn't see it coming, if they didn't have countermeasures. But we're already thinking about those things, we're already thinking about countermeasures and I think that's good.

Speaker 2:

And on the attack side, I think it's mostly cyber, I think attacking critical infrastructure and or defending against cyber attacks on critical infrastructure. If we look at the effects of COVID on the United States and look at how much pandemonium was created in the country and think about how you could cause that kind of effect with a cyber attack that takes out critical infrastructure and not ever fire a bullet, then you could affect a lot of things economically and on just the zeitgeist of the country, you cause a lot of trouble and then interference in elections. A lot of people are talking about disinformation and the importance of countering disinformation. It's not something that you know, we're involved with with Nautilus, but I think the technology is going to be very complex, given, you know, the ability to generate narratives with AI.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, certainly, ai has opened up a whole new performance arena around psyops and just general disinformation campaigns. But the OT, or physio-cyber, is something I've been really railing for and trying to bring more typical enterprise cybersecurity people their awareness to physio cyber things like manufacturing industrial is no consolidation of. There's no major player that owns 80% of that market. It's really very emergent right now and so, yeah, I love that example. There's so much opportunity there, so much needs to get done. It's pretty frightening if somebody wants to do the research. I mean my background being in what you can do with directed energy attacks or shielding but just on a very basic cyber perspective, physio-cyber system is unbelievably important. Fantastic. What do you see coming up for Nautilus and for DefenseWorks?

Speaker 2:

So DefenseWorks has been around for over 10 years as the largest provider of Department of DefenseIAs Partnership Intermediary Agreements and that falls underneath Title 15 of the Congressional Code. A lot of people have heard of SoftWorks. That's a large PIA that's funded by and supports SOCOM. That's underneath Defense Works.

Speaker 2:

And a lot of people have also heard of AFWERX, which started out of Defense Works. But then the Air Force says we really like AFWERX, let's make it a government organization. So AFWERX is no longer APIA, but Defense Works also runs ERDIC Works, cific, energy Works, hs Works with Homeland Security, ic Works with CIA. So DefenseWorks if anyone goes to their website, we can see the whole constellation of these partnership intermediary agreements and some other tools that we've extended to the government. And Nautilus is only two years old. We started out as a partnership with Naval X and then this year we pivoted and attached to Naval Surface Warfare Division Dahlgren, nsw. Dahlgren is really great because they have a large R&D budget. They're really focused on Navy and Marine Corps tech problems, and so we can come alongside them and offer all of the processes that Defense Works has developed over the last 10 years to help accelerate access to non-traditional companies.

Speaker 1:

What are some of the more interesting or exciting challenges that you see Nautilus participating in? I saw some information around building up the ability for ship repair. Ship building is a massive issue, a little bit bigger than my appetite, but it certainly is a critical issue.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, we ran a project in January, kicked off in January, still running, called the Component Repair Center Collaboration Event, crc, and the concept is that if anyone's been in the military in the last hundred years, you know that if you have a broken part on something not just a ship, but it could be an airplane or whatever then waiting for it to be delivered sometimes misses the deadline and you might have to go rip that part off of another. You know, aircraft in the hangar cannibalize the part and that's not a good way to do business when you have the ability in a lot of cases to 3D print a part and have it ready. So the real question is do we have the intellectual property rights to make that part? Can it pass specifications for whatever the stress testing is to be used, and what kinds of machines and processes do we need for the manufacturing of the future for our military industrial complex? And so we started brainstorming on that.

Speaker 2:

We brought in about 140 companies and some of them non-traditional, some of them crimes and traditional, and we had a multi-day event. And then the process will be then to write white papers around this new concept of component repair centers and then to build these, and by the time we get to building them. Nautilus will be out of the picture because our whole process is bringing the right people to the conversation and we don't take any equity or fees or anything. We're funded by the Navy to put these events on and make those partnerships happen. So we're a neutral middle man to help get the right people in the room.

Speaker 2:

But once that happens, then hopefully we propel the Navy forward into the next generation of manufacturing, because we don't want to be stuck anymore in these stovepipes or these hurdles where you can't get the part you need on demand. And the nice thing about the component repair centers is they want to go small to large, they want to go small parts all the way up to aircraft carrier shafts, and so the vision really is to be able to make almost anything on demand. The other services are interested, and so it's not just limited to ships.

Speaker 1:

It could be for aircraft, it could be for vehicles, ground vehicles, that plays into a much larger discussion in defense industrial base around advanced manufacturing building back in the US and then how that can and smoothly collaborate with what we need to do for defense right.

Speaker 1:

So moving across whether that's through primes or through national labs or directly with DOD entities, or to be able to bring those people into the room and show them the specific problems that people in the service have firsthand and have those discussions and open up the curtain the behind the scenes kind of curtain and get those people and mix them up in one room, is really it's really mind blowing to me.

Speaker 1:

Growing up in manufacturing, a lot of that in the past was just a total mystery, right. Even seeing and really collaborating with a prime would be a complete mystery. And now the world is much more porous. Like going down and going to Norfolk or going to Tampa and sitting in a room with three or four organizations and partnering and having an open dialogue and discussion about a very specific problem or an upcoming challenge that's perceived or a problem that just occurred is much more common, right, and it's amazing to see organizations actually dedicated to the pursuit of doing those conversations at scale right as practice versus exception. Like I said, that is not really my problem area, but it's amazing to see because it's such a large scale problem to get people in the room to talk about.

Speaker 2:

So yeah, traditionally a lot of PAs have not been used for these large scale problems as much with the Navy. With the kind of platforms we're dealing with, it's useful to do some of the early stage relationship building and ideation. If you look at, there's a great expert on OTAs. His name's Rick Dunn and we had him speak at a Dahlgren webinar two months ago but he wrote a blog post on how PIAs and OTAs can work together. He also, I think he did a podcast episode Because PIAs can be that good pilot light to get things going and then OTAs can help you do a non-traditional contracting vehicle around R&D to get things funded and moving along.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it makes sense. And if you want to bring in non-traditional innovators, so people that have commercial businesses or they're IP owners if you want to bring in a pre-seed or seed startup, they're not going to have somebody on their team that has written an SBIR before, certainly not somebody that has government contracting experience and can go through a full-blown RFP process. But they may be able to write a paper and then, with some support whether that's through PTAP or directly with the PIA to respond to a CSO or get an OTA contract for prototyping and get that transformed and implemented for the Navy. And that's an amazing use of entrepreneurial support.

Speaker 1:

It's just everyone that I talk to that, especially in hard tech, they're so focused on building the technology, building the supply chain around it, protecting their intellectual property, maybe getting funding that when when here's this great opportunity from the Air Force you should respond to this they're like I don't know how to even apply where they exist, how they exist, how to do the contracting. At least it's available now and there's more and more resources, but it's still it's. A big piece of feedback is, unless there's an OTA on the other side of that conversation, versus, like a demo, a lot of startups there. If you're a hard tech startup, you have three to five people, really awesome technology. You can't even afford to go to a demo.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 1:

So, like even a paid pilot, that's on the other side of a small you know, small contract is amazingly valuable, right For nontraditional innovators. It's very cool, yeah. What else do you see on the future for Nautilus, if you're allowed to divulge the roadmap of this's interested in a lot of different types of things.

Speaker 2:

And the nice thing about APIA, even though we're partnered with Dahlgren, is that we can still work with any other government agency if they want to collaborate with Dahlgren. So we're actively talking to other military organizations and government agencies. And what's nice about the Defense Works Network is that we have relationships through our other hubs with other government agencies so we can do collaborations with the other hubs on those activities. So, for instance, Homeland Security Works has been doing some things with the Coast Guard. So if there's overlapping interests between the Coast Guard technology and a Navy technology, we could co-host that and there might be a lot of goodness in sharing knowledge across those two communities.

Speaker 1:

It's fantastic. I'll make sure to put Nautilus22.org in the show notes and a link to DefenseWorks so everyone has good access to that. Graham, I really appreciate you taking the time to be on the show today. Before we get out of here, do you have any parting words of advice to innovators or the people thinking that they want to jump into defense tech? That's typically our listeners.

Speaker 2:

I believe I like to coin a term dual market because I think nowadays every technology is useful for both government and the civilian world. Even if you were to look at a hypersonic missile, you could break it up into sensors and components that are probably useful on the commercial market somehow. So really, what we're talking about is can you sell it to both a small commercial company and sell it to the government? Can it be sold in both places? So I would like to say to anybody who's doing emerging technology in the commercial space your technology is valuable to people that are in uniform. It's valuable to people that are in the government. Organizations like Nautilus are designed to help you get into the conversation. If you're curious, you want to talk to me, we can set up a Zoom call or we could. If you're in DC, we can grab coffee, and the purpose is to close that gap.

Speaker 2:

Some people talk about the valley of death. You know, once you get a little bit of R&D funding, a SIBR trying to get into program record, that's one valley, but another valley is this cultural valley which is between the emerging tech startup world and government, and we're designed to try to close that. And I also like to tell people that the innovation ecosystem, whether it's government or military or even commercial, it's a human terrain. The human terrain is a term we used to use right off 9-11. We had human terrain teams that would go into Iraq and Afghanistan and they understood the tribal cultures, they understood the languages, they understood who's who in the zoo and they understood the tribal cultures, they understood the languages, they understood who's who in the zoo, and innovation is like that.

Speaker 2:

So the whole point of building these partnerships is so you get to know the people, and not just a list of programs or a list of acronyms, but actually getting to know people that care about your technology, that care about the problem and can close those gaps. Innovation ecosystems are a human terrain. So getting to know that terrain requires getting to know people.

Speaker 1:

That's going to be the tagline for this show Innovation. Ecosystems are a human terrain. Thank you so much Graham. I really appreciate it. My name is Callie Keene and this has been the Startup Defense.

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