Transcript: The Unsolved Mystery at Barksdale Air Force Base w/ Andy Lowery @SRS #299

Correct.

SHAWN RYAN: 49 drones.

ANDY LOWERY: 49 in one shot. Yeah. In one second.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow, this is awesome. I’m going to frame this.

ANDY LOWERY: Put it in here.

SHAWN RYAN: Thank you.

ANDY LOWERY: Thank you.

From the Navy to Microwaves: Andy’s Career Path

SHAWN RYAN: So, Andy, I want to — before we get into all things Epirus and directed EMP weapons — how did you get into this? You were a nuke in the Navy, correct?

ANDY LOWERY: Correct. That’s right. So I started nuclear power. I started enlisted. I enlisted in 1991. I got inspired by the Lava Monster Marine Corps commercial. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen that one, but it was, I think, to this day the greatest recruiting video that ever was made by anyone.

And I’m sitting in the basement of my girlfriend, who’s now my wife of 35 years, but at the time my girlfriend, and not doing much, working at a TGI Fridays, I think. And I saw this commercial of this medieval warrior fighting a lava monster, and he turns around and snaps it up to his shoulder and it turns into a Marine Corps saber, Marine Corps uniform. And I went, “I’m going to be a Marine.” I don’t know what they do. I don’t know what they operate on, what they do. But if something like that lava monster — I’ve got to go do this.

And so I went down to the Marine Corps recruiting station the next day, and they had the door closed. And a lot of people know, everywhere you see a Marine Corps station, you see a Navy right next door. And so the Navy was open, and I looked in, and they said, “Oh, come on in.” I said, “Oh sir, I’m looking for Marines.” And he goes, “Well, you know, the Navy owns the Marine Corps.” And I went, “Oh, no kidding.” And he’s like, “Come on in, I’ll tell you about it.” And the rest is history.

I ended up going Navy nuke versus Marine Corps. And my Marine Corps friends to this day say, “You made a big mistake that day. You should have stuck with the Marines.” So much for the Lava commercial. Yeah, the Lava commercial did it though, but got me into the Navy. And it was probably a better fit for me anyways because I’m a strong engineer, strong in mathematics and physics. And I did real well.

And the Navy is smart. They take the best enlisted guys and say, “Hey, these ought to be officers.” And they put me through a program called Enlisted Commissioning Program. And I went to University of Illinois in the mid-’90s and I studied RF, microwaves, antennas, all of these things. But then I went back into the Navy and served another 5 or 6 years of active duty as an officer. Never got to use much microwaves in the nuclear power plants — it didn’t really apply.

So I wanted to get into that, right? When I stopped being active duty, I had transitioned to reserves in 2002. I went, “Let me find a company where I can work on microwaves. That’s what I did in my college. Let’s revisit that.” I ended up at Maycom, and Maycom was an RF microwave component company that makes the pieces. And I worked there very successfully for about 5 years. And then that followed with my Raytheon chief engineer position, where I really got involved in electronic warfare and microwaves and electromagnetic energy systems.

SHAWN RYAN: What was Raytheon doing?

Electronic Warfare and the Next Generation Jammer

ANDY LOWERY: Well, Raytheon does everything. They’re a prime — and this was back when Raytheon had a pretty doggone good reputation. It was under Bill Swanson as the CEO, and then Tom Kennedy took over after him. But with Bill Swanson, he and I worked together on Next Generation Jammer, which was a big new age electronic warfare program that basically took older technology — transmit wave tubes and vacuum tubes and that sort of thing — and then upgraded it to a phased array, an antenna, a very sophisticated antenna that was powered by something called gallium nitride.

I’ve heard on your show you guys talking a little bit about gallium nitride. It’s this really remarkable semiconductor — like silicon is a semiconductor. It’s a remarkable semiconductor that can amplify signals and withstand huge, huge power densities way, way better than traditional semiconductors or things that we’ve used before in the past. And that is really what’s unlocked a new class of directed energy, a new class of electronic warfare, a new class of a whole bunch of different systems that leverage that kind of technology, the gallium nitride technology. And that’s really where I found my niche, being sort of an expert in systems that leverage gallium nitride in various ways.

SHAWN RYAN: What year was this with Raytheon?

ANDY LOWERY: I started in 2007, 2008. And I worked at Raytheon through 2014. About the end of 2014 is when I transitioned into startups.

SHAWN RYAN: What were you working on? Jamming? What specifically?

ANDY LOWERY: So there’s something called the Next Generation Jammer. It just looks like a fuel pod. It goes on the wings of a version of the F-18, a version of the Hornet called the Growler, the EA-18 Growler. It flies on the wings and it just jams everything. It has a huge frequency bandwidth that it can move around in and it can jam anything. It can do all kinds of sophisticated jamming — like state-of-the-art.

And when you hear a lot about these operations that we’ve been doing lately, you hear a lot about, “Oh, the lights all went out, everything just — the radars didn’t work or whatever. The air defenses got crippled.” And I think President Trump said something about a “discombobulator.” It’s one of the things that I think he’s got in his mind about discombobulation. It is kind of that. It discombobulates circuits, meaning it basically has a whole different sorts of attacks that it can do to take down a radar, or confuse a radar, confuse an operator of a radar, amongst other things — cellular stations, different electrical base stations and things like that.

SHAWN RYAN: What about humans? I mean, the discombobulator that we’ve all heard about — everybody was — yeah, that’s the fetal position on the ground.

Directed Energy: Targeting Electronics vs. Humans

ANDY LOWERY: Yeah, well, that’s completely different. So it’s hard because the microwaves are invisible. It’s hard to kind of see the differences. And so when you’re looking at attacking electronics, most electronics use pulses. They use pulses to do — like a radar will send out a pulse and then it returns a pulse. So you’re using a system that leverages a lot of pulse power, and that means your peak power is very high, your average power in comparison is very low.

Whereas a microwave oven or something that is tuned towards biological things has a very high average power. Your peak and average power are equal because you’re trying to get a very, very high continuous power or beam on like a human being, or on a chicken in a microwave or something that you’re trying to heat up. And so you design the microwave system very differently. You choose different frequencies, you operate it much, much differently.

And then if you do it on the safe side, which some companies have done, they do it up at like W-band, which is a way high frequency that — you hear about the skin and stuff getting kind of like needles and feeling like — well, that’s just kind of heating the skin. It’s localized heating the skin. And so that can deter crowds and keep crowds at bay.

And then there’s been rumors of other things out there like the Havana Effect and stuff like that. But really, I have zero — I don’t have any knowledge of any of that. Like, I don’t know that those things are real, if they are really real or they’re not. I’m not aware.

SHAWN RYAN: Gotcha. Gotcha.

From Raytheon to Epirus: Building Leonidas

ANDY LOWERY: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: So how did you get into Epirus?

ANDY LOWERY: Well, a lot of the folks at Raytheon, it’s kind of almost in some ways a spinout. Nathan Mintz worked for me at Raytheon. He was the founding CEO. He had Bo Maher. Dr. Maher came out of Georgia Tech, worked in my organization for a whole number of years. Me and Bo got real close at Raytheon.

And then when the team had built the company to a certain sort of stage, we had gotten through most of the initial technology discovery to see if it actually would work. And we were starting to look at product market fit and then eventually scaling the company. They called me and asked, they said, “Hey, what are you doing? You want to join the company?” And I told them, “Just as long as I’m not the CEO, I’ll join.” And they said, “Okay.” And they made me the chief product officer.

And I was really happy in that role. I was doing great stuff. And then down the line, one thing led to another and I ended up in the position of CEO a couple of years later. So I think Bo is happy and Nathan is real happy that I eventually made that decision and together with the board, obviously, to offer me the position.

But I came in — this is my third CEO job and it’s not an easy job for those out there that have done it. It’s very lonely and high pressure and you’ve got a lot of pressure both directions and it’s tough. So I needed a break. And I came in and I was able to do what I love to do, which is build stuff and do the engineering and help sort of advance the design that the previous team had done.

So when you look at the designs we are now releasing and going into production today, those were designs that when I was the chief product officer, me and the team just redid completely. We’ve redone the entire work that we had done in previous generations of the system and call this system Leonidas Generation 2. That’s a second sort of major, major upgrade that we did in order to improve things like range and a lot of the survivability type requirements.

The Founding of Epirus and Early Counter-Drone Vision

SHAWN RYAN: When did Epirus start? When was it founded?

ANDY LOWERY: It’s founded in 2018, right before COVID. And most of the work that they did to get the system proving that it would be viable was done during the COVID period, actually. Brought people in, and we were safe about it. But they had to work kind of hand in hand, and it was a real discovery phase those first 2 or 3 years.

And then I joined in 2021, right when we started to get into product market fit and doing our first demos for the Army. Army RCTO was the name of the organization, which is now called PAE Fires. We had done some tests with Army RCTO and some other companies in order to see what type of system would be at least worth the Army taking a look at to see if it had a viability for some of their missions. And that all started in about 2021.

SHAWN RYAN: Was it always counter-drone initiatives?

ANDY LOWERY: Yeah, we brought up the idea with counter-drone, but we really didn’t set out to build a directed energy machine. What we set out to build was a really, really high-powered RF transmitter, something that could put out all kinds of electromagnetic interference. Or if you wanted to make it a transmitter for a radar, it could be a transmitter for a radar. Then you could have a receiver sitting next to it that could send the signals out and the receiver could take those signals back in and you could use it as a radar. We had ideas for that. We had ideas for other applications — counter outboard motors, for example, on engines on boats. You know, you see a lot of the unmanned boats now getting out there with these engines in the back. Well, it has the same effects on those commercial type systems as it does on drones.

It basically looks for anything that has a computer board, and it uses a very high electromagnetic interference field to couple voltages onto the computer board. So the computer board just basically ceases to function. We used to call this the “blue screen of death” when it was like Microsoft causing it on our computers, and we would have to unplug the computer completely and plug it back in, give it a real big reboot cycle. This is very similar to the type of effect that Leonidas and this type of directed energy has on computer systems.

SHAWN RYAN: Okay. So it basically developed into counter-drone technology. It developed into just a sector.

ANDY LOWERY: Well, it was always there. I mean, the founders like Joe and Grant that you’ve had on a couple of times — they had the vision. And this is something that Grant and Joe and even at that time there was John Tennant, Alex Moore, who still sits on our board — all of those guys were involved in the very onset of the company. They were all founders. They were basically financial founders, in a way, but the type that dig in and actually help with the engineering and with the thought process.

And from a big picture, they kind of saw it. I mean, Joe, to his credit, and Grant too, they saw this coming. They saw this drone explosion, if you will, before it really was anything. And in fact, they anticipated even before that we would have something on stateside soil. And unbelievably, we haven’t. It’s almost unbelievable because of just the ease at which that could be done. But thankfully, through maybe our protections and intelligence and things like that, we haven’t really had any issues to deal with on U.S. soil.

But now we see it. We saw it in Ukraine, and now we’re seeing it play out in a huge way in our presence in the Gulf region now. And so drones are here to stay and they are very, very troublesome things.

SHAWN RYAN: They had that kind of insight back in 2018.

ANDY LOWERY: I know it is. To me, it’s amazing. To me, it’s a whole different kind of visionary. I think of myself as a visionary, but more like a pragmatic visionary, if you will. Like, what’s the next stage? What’s the next step? How do we make a better generation, a longer range system?

Visionaries like Joe and the board and Grant and 8VC and Red Cell and stuff — they’re tapped into like 100 different people. And in that sort of network, they juxtapose all of that information and all those inputs. And they come out with these enormously creative ideas that are brilliant. They knew Bo Maher, they knew Nathan Mintz from their history together and went to them and said, “Hey, we’re thinking about something along these lines. Do you think we should take a risk and put the money, put the capital to work?”

And at the time, the military had not thought of this as a good approach. They thought the approach might not be successful. So Joe set out and Grant set out to prove them all wrong. And I think today we’re sitting in a pretty good position. I think the evidence is kind of self-apparent that we’ve proven them all wrong.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow.

ANDY LOWERY: Wow.

The Leonidas System: From Prototype to Production

SHAWN RYAN: So was Leonidas the first product?

ANDY LOWERY: Well, Leonidas is a scalable product. So it has these little elements that can be much bigger. We can make much bigger antennas and have much more range, or we have smaller ones. And so the class of product we call Leonidas was the first thing that they started working on.

And the first one was actually a bunch of huge antennas. It had like only 9 or 10 elements and had these huge antennas. It looks like — I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the pictures of like the first Meta glasses, or Apple, you know, does the augmented reality stuff — they just look like Frankensteins. They’re not compact. They’re not down into the right form factor. They don’t have all the performance figured out yet. That’s what the team built in that COVID period. They built their very, very first prototype of the Leonidas, and they weren’t entirely sure how it would even be incorporated or what service would want to go after it and all of that. And it was a big risk. It really was. But the foresight that Grant and Joe had was pretty remarkable. Really remarkable.

SHAWN RYAN: How many products are there? Well, classes of products, I guess we have.

The Defense Innovation Gap: Neo-Primes vs. Traditional Contractors

ANDY LOWERY: We have platforms. And right now we have the platform called Leonidas. Now, when I say that, people focus on the directed energy machine, but it’s really a whole series of different things. We have to have, first of all, layers. You never are going to get a panacea against this kind of threat. You’re not going to get one system that works in all situations counter-drone. You’re always going to have various layers and various technologies, and we can get into the details of what those are and why some technologies work really, really well in some applications, and then other technologies work really, really well in other applications.

And so when we started to take a look at what other products we need in order to finish sort of the system, the system of systems, so that we’re not just saying, “Hey, we have this great effector, but it has to plug in or we have to leverage what you have and what you’re using already inside your country.” We knew kind of at the beginning, or when I started as a chief product officer, that we would need sort of a standalone version where we could have radar, electro-optical telescopes, all of that stuff, and our own command and control software to kind of tie it all together.

So we built that and then we built basically where we can take the head off and plug into systems like Anduril’s Lattice. And so we’re working with Anduril pretty tightly in order to ensure that as they release Lattice for their various customers that are starting to pick up, that our system is well controlled by that software. So it basically became a situation where we needed other products in order to complete the product that we had. And so by that need, we went out and either sourced through third parties or developed ourselves, a whole sensing suite, command and control suite, simulator.

We have this really incredible— it’s built by guys that used to work at Call of Duty, on the Call of Duty program and Blizzard. And we’ve got about 12 or so designers, which at Raytheon, no one ever hires designers at Raytheon hardly. It’s like something unique. Well, they don’t have a design-led philosophy there. And when we talk about what is Silicon Valley adding to the whole mix, if you will, you say, “Well, why is Silicon Valley sort of better in some way?” I lean into the design-led thinking and design-led thinking is human factors, human thinking from the very beginning. That’s what it means at its core.

In Raytheon, you’re a services contractor. You have the military that decides what they want you to build. They put them all down in like 1,000 requirements. They hand you a bunch of requirements and you just build a system that meets the requirements. You get paid and then you move on to the next system. There’s no real design process there. It’s like baked into the system engineering. It’s baked into the way that operational commands give feedback to procurement commands and to requirement commands. And all of that is a very bureaucratic process. You get good products out of it. You get expensive products out of it, you get exquisite products out of it.

But what we’re seeing now, it’s a whole new chapter. The stuff that’s built at the big primes are not sufficient for this new fight. And before anybody gets angry with that and why I say that— I’ll give you an analogy. For the last decades, the primes have been focused on, let’s say, going out and hunting a lion or lions, like big, big beasts. They have to bring in the big nets, the big guns, the big whatever that they need to go hunt lions. The problem we see today are like mice and little mice that are running around. And what we’re doing with our big rockets and our big defensive systems are using the same thing we would go up against lions against mice.

And it’s really that fundamental. Can you now develop mice-like apparatuses, Raytheon, quickly? Short order like they’re doing in Ukraine, or you’re not rigged to do it, or you’re not set up to do that. And not that they can’t change, and not that they can’t bolt on companies like Epirus and let them operate sort of independently and still bring in the human factors and the design-led stuff.

SHAWN RYAN: But I mean, you’re talking about shooting a $2 million missile to get a $10,500 drone, right? That’s what you’re talking about. Yes, it’s not sustainable.

ANDY LOWERY: It’s just not even like appropriate. It’s like, would you ever take a huge gun or huge— I don’t know what you want to do if you don’t say gun, like net or what, some cage. Would you have a cage for a lion with the bars this far apart? You’re stuffing mice in it and they’re just running through the bars of the cage. It just isn’t the right stuff for this particular fight. And the right stuff needs to be here yesterday. It needs to appear yesterday.

Why the Big Primes Aren’t Keeping Up

SHAWN RYAN: And why do you think the big— I mean, why aren’t the big primes doing this? Did they just get cocky? Do they think they don’t need to innovate? What is going on? I mean, I love it. I love seeing— I mean, I’ve interviewed a whole ton of these companies like Epirus that are coming up, Shield AI, Anduril, like a bunch of these. And the innovation that’s coming out of these companies is just amazing. I don’t know what’s coming out of the other companies. I saw some of the stuff that Lockheed came out with at that event in DC that I met you at. But the younger, leaner, more innovative companies just seem to be outperforming the big 5 defense tech firms. Am I wrong on that or?

ANDY LOWERY: No, you’re not wrong, but I wouldn’t blame them. Palmer says this very eloquently. I’ve heard him speak on this topic a couple of times. Palmer Luckey of Anduril— he would say they’re not incentivized to be fast and creative and move very quickly. They’re not incentivized to at-risk spend $200 million developing a new system that they might have a customer for, but they’re not quite sure that they’re going to have a customer for. They’re incentivized to listen very, very well to the customer being the military and go off like a services company.

Like when you go to a law firm and you say, “Hey, law firm, I need you to help me with this dog bite case that I’m in the middle of here or whatever.” And that law firm then pivots and says, “Okay, we’re going to work on that.” That’s not how the new neo-primes work. They don’t work like a law firm. They don’t work like the primes. They guess. They go out, they survey the land, they see the problems, they talk with the generals, they talk with the various folks that are out in the field. And then they guess at what a product that they could invent that they have in their head might work to solve this problem or that problem.

Some of them are winners. Some of them will win. Some of them will lose. Just like in consumer products where you have a consumer product company that just doesn’t make it, but others that do. You’re going to have winners and losers, and that’s where the big risk comes into play. But if you’re willing to take that risk, then you get way more innovation. Way more creativity because you’re not bounded to this very systematic, hand you this, hand you that, stepwise 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Never really do anything unless the government says, “Here’s a check, here’s how you get paid.” And so they’re incentivized to just wait for the requirements, wait for the direction on what they should build, and then they go build it. Just like a law firm. That’s what primes are today.

So are they useful? Yes. Will they build the big exquisite machines still into the future on a very robust, well-exercised process? Yes. I still think there’s a big place for them in the future world. But will they be the ones that can make the mice traps and all the things that need to come out like in a month to month to month type iterative cycle and risk a lot of money up in the front end of the thing to make it all work? They just aren’t really set up to do that. And the only way that I could see them becoming more like that is if they were to take a risk and, let’s say, buy Epirus and then let us operate exactly like we’ve been operating under our investors and our board that we’re under now. Just operate the same, but be under their umbrella, so to speak, or their brand, but still operate the way that we’ve been operating. I could see that being one way.

SHAWN RYAN: Is that starting to happen?

ANDY LOWERY: I’ve seen it in bits like Lockheed. You mentioned, I know they have a big fund that basically funds different small companies that they find having a lot of potential. I’m not sure how many of those are transitioning yet to acquisition, but I think that’s the intent, is to basically get involved by finding ones that have a real win and then transitioning them into a growth phase.

SHAWN RYAN: Okay.

ANDY LOWERY: Because as you start to scale and you’re talking about field service operators out in the field, you’re talking about people all over the world that are needing support maintaining these systems, logistics for these systems, all the MIL PF type stuff that people talk a lot about. All of that, the primes do well. They’re well situated, they’re well staffed, they have people all over the world. When you need to scale in mass, it’s nice to partner with primes because they have mass.

For example, General Dynamics Land Systems is a major, major partner to us. And I have really never had a partnership quite as close as we are with GD. And GD ends up being that sort of big brother to say, “Hey, do you have people in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Middle East and other places? Because we do. We have loads of people over there and we can help you scale when it comes time to scale,” versus trying to build everything from new and everything fresh. Leverage what they’re good at— scaling, mass production, field support, all of those types of elements. And then keep the innovation and keep the stuff that these neo-primes are doing really well, like Shield AI and all the rest of them that you named and more. There’s many, many more. All of those companies are doing the innovation really, really well right now. In particular for these types of threats.

Lessons from Ukraine: Cheap, Fast, and Distributed

SHAWN RYAN: Gotcha, gotcha. I mean, it just seems, especially with the current wars that we’re involved in right now, in particular Ukraine, with all the— I mean, everything just seems so cheap that they’re doing over there.

ANDY LOWERY: Yeah, cheap and innovative and quick. And death by a thousand cuts, as they say, right? And everything is very distributed. It almost feels to me like if people know in the audience about cyber and like how cyber works, right? If you look at Symantec and how it defends against these little Trojan viruses that get in and try to do harm to your system, those Trojans are like 110, 150, 200 lines of code. They can be very, very small pieces of software, but Symantec needs millions or billions of lines of code in order to defend against these little harassing software-type drones, if you will.

And if you look at the physical world now, we have that sort of metaphor where the layered defense that we know in cyber defense and the swarms that you see in cyber attacks— where you’ll get viruses coming in this way, viruses coming in this way— those types of attack vectors, if you will, are being used in the physical world now. So the drones are like the little Trojans that are everywhere doing mass swarms, trying to overwhelm the enemy through just sheer quantity and mass. And then our defensive networks are becoming more and more layered and nuanced, so that we have these layers of protection.

Because what you don’t hear in the news a lot is like 9 out of every 10 of these drones were taken care of. It’s just 1 or 2 out of 10 that are leaking past.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow.

ANDY LOWERY: And as they increase, that ratio scales. So if they send in 100, that means 10 will get past. If they send in 1,000, maybe 100 will get past. And so we need more layers. We need more systems like Leonidas presented in the fight so that we can take care of the leakers, take care of the swarms, take care of the dark drones.

SHAWN RYAN: Leakers? What are leakers?

Leonidas: The Force Field Against Drone Swarms

ANDY LOWERY: Leakers are what I just said. If you have a system in place like an Iron Dome that takes care of 9 out of the 10 Shaheds that come in and you get one that gets in, that’s your leaker that kind of gets through your traditional network. And Leonidas is good for those. It’s a good last line of defense, like a close-in weapon system, but with electromagnetic energy.

It’s a good analogy if the listeners know about the SeaWiz, the little R2-D2 G2s on ships that have the 5,000 rounds a minute type of ability to just do that close-in protection. What we’re doing with Leonidas at EPRIS is creating basically a close-in weapon system, but using electromagnetic bullets versus physical bullets to kind of provide that last line of defense.

And one, it can provide a very nice last line of defense against leakers. We talked about those. Really nice line of defense against swarms. Like, the gift I gave you was a 49 shootdown, but that doesn’t mean we can’t shoot down 500 or 1,000 or more. And then it gives you a really nice defense against fiber optic drones that you’ve seen these in the Ukraine now. These guys—

SHAWN RYAN: What about the drones, the tethered?

ANDY LOWERY: Tethered, yeah, they’re dark. We call them dark drones because it could be fiber optic in the future. It could be autonomous drones that just don’t use any sort of RF or any sort of global positioning or any of that in order to see where it’s at and to navigate. Autonomous drones will be like fiber without the line, without the tethered fishing line that goes behind it.

But those types of drones are just as susceptible against our effects as a regular remote-controlled drone. So it doesn’t really jam it. Like, it’s like an EMP, like you said at the very beginning. It’s like a small little electromagnetic pulses that we’re putting out exactly directed where we want to direct them.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow. Let’s dive into Leonidas. What are all of its capabilities? What does it do? Where is it deployed?

How Leonidas Works: A Real-World Force Field

ANDY LOWERY: So just to start really simple and then we’ll double-click down in a simple way, it’s sort of like the first version that the human race of a force field that anyone’s ever created. If listeners are seeing Star Trek and Star Wars, they’ll put these fields up and those fields obviously in the movies are like against physical objects that’ll like bounce off of them like a wall or whatever.

Our system isn’t quite to that level of sophistication yet, but as far as a version 1 of a force field that is a close-in protective field that sends out these very, very, very high, high-powered electromagnetic interference waves — when the drone — if you imagine here, here’s the field that we’re putting out there. As the drone gets into this electromagnetic interference field, it might stutter, the camera might stop working. Then it gets deeper and deeper, closer and closer into the intensity of the electromagnetic interference, and eventually the computer just can’t operate. It just does not operate under that strong of a field surrounding the computer board, and the computer goes dead, or one of the servos locks up or whatever.

SHAWN RYAN: So this is like a bubble.

ANDY LOWERY: It’s like a bubble. Exactly. You could put a bubble around an embassy, you could put a bubble around a White House, you could put a bubble around anything that you can think of really. A country—

SHAWN RYAN: A country.

ANDY LOWERY: A country. Well, that would take a lot of money and a lot of systems, but you could theoretically do that if you wanted to, like, make something huge, building size. You could go out miles with a system like this. Like, if you wanted to, let’s say, protect the Straits of Taiwan, and you wanted to build an enormous building-size version of Leonidas — you saw the one out there earlier, that one was like 10 foot by 10 foot. Imagine 100 feet by 100 feet or bigger.

SHAWN RYAN: Oh sh. Okay.

ANDY LOWERY: You could really power project then and start thinking about huge things to defend against these types of drones with a system that big.

SHAWN RYAN: Can they interconnect?

ANDY LOWERY: Yes, they can interconnect.

SHAWN RYAN: Meaning — what comes to my mind is the Iron Dome over Israel. How is that built? Is that a bunch of systems all linked together for one big dome or is that one massive device?

Comparing Leonidas to Iron Dome

ANDY LOWERY: In essence it basically gives you a theoretical, in our minds, dome. But how it actually operates is much more down the traditional OODA loops where you have detect, you’re like scanning basically wide area search and then you’re tracking and then you’re like, okay, assign this effector to that type of threat. We know that it can take out of it and then it takes out of it. So it’s really the coordination that makes Iron Dome so successful. It’s a very close-knit coordinated system that works really, really well.

In fact, I met not too long ago in Singapore, one of the original engineers that has credit to designing that Iron Dome. And they have other versions with directed energy now and other things, but nothing like Leonidas. We’ve been talking to Israel and we’ve been talking to others about something like Leonidas. They’re very interested. They want to work with us because of all the issues that are now plaguing Israel. You see it on the news every night. If you see something get hit in Israel, that’s a leaker, or it’s a dark drone, or it was a swarm that just overwhelmed their defenses as they’re now rigged.

Steering the Beam: The 49-Drone Shootdown Explained

SHAWN RYAN: So I’ve seen — Grant actually sent me some videos of capabilities. Or actually, maybe I found them on your website. But the way it appeared to me is it’s 49 drones, 49 individual shots, and all that happens simultaneously. Am I off on this?

ANDY LOWERY: Yeah, and I’m even thinking about using augmented reality glasses to show what’s going on and tie that into the computer that’s doing the commands and stuff, so you could see what’s happening. What happened in that 49-drone video — if the viewers really frame by frame take a look at it — we do 3 major spots. But it all happens in less than a second. So we hit the one group that sits there, the second group there, and then the third group there. And we do that within like a half a second. We go 1, 2, 3.

SHAWN RYAN: Holy sh.

ANDY LOWERY: So we’re steering the beam kind of like in a laser light show. You know how they can steer one laser and make like a whole shape? We’re steering the beam so quickly that the drones that are falling prey to us think that the beam’s all over. But what we’re really doing is very quickly on the timescale, moving the beam around in whatever pattern the drones require us to do.

So we’re not going to throw away energy. Like if there’s not a drone there, we’re not going to point it in that direction. We’ll shape the basically force field for whatever sort of targets that are out there in front of us.

SHAWN RYAN: So the force field morphs into what you need it to morph.

ANDY LOWERY: Exactly. That’s a great way of putting it.

SHAWN RYAN: Okay, sh, that’s badass.

ANDY LOWERY: It’s tip of the spear tech. It really is. And it’s why I told you at the beginning, I love learning. I love being part of something that’s so advanced, even in some ways controversial. We have our naysayers out there. We have the folks that say—

SHAWN RYAN: Well, what the f* is controversial about counter-drone?

Solving the Counter-Drone Problem: Layered Defense

ANDY LOWERY: No, not about that. I don’t have too many people that say, “Hey, let’s forget about this counter-drone problem. I don’t think it’s going to be a problem in a couple of years.” I think most people are wedded to the idea that drones are here and here to stay, and they’re a really big problem.

But there’s all kinds of opinions of what the best way to solve the problem, right? There’s all differences. They’ve got laser systems. You have guys making Gatling guns in the back of pickup trucks — the Bullfrog guy at Allen Control Systems building something like that, another kind of close-in weapon system that provides with bullets anyway, sort of that last layer of defense, I should say. And then you have a whole bunch of other types of systems that, again, like I said earlier, work really well in certain conditions and not as well in other conditions.

So the hard problem that the Army, that the Air Force, that our foreign allies have right now is figuring out what to pick — what to use in this layer or that layer. And that’s why we’ve leaned into the simulation. Like, we’ve leaned into the video game where you can play like tower defense but in real life and drop in Leonidas, drop in other electronic warfare systems, drop in radar systems, and say, “If I set up a protection scheme like this—”

And then we partnered with another company called Gambit — and Gambit’s another — Neo Prime — that basically runs scenarios like drones could come in and do this. They could come in high and drop down. They could run 100 different scenarios and say, “Will this layered defense network or this layered defense scheme work for this particular target?” That’s going to be absolutely 100% required as we move further and further in the future.

And lots of companies are doing it. I think we’re doing it in a unique way right outside of Fort Sill in Lawton, Oklahoma. We have a big experience center, experience site that soldiers and others can come into and play video games. It’s like Ender’s Game, right? If you practice, you just fight like you practice. And so we’ve created simulators and emulators that look like you’re in the fight. It appears like you’re doing it. So when you go from Fort Sill area over into the battlefield, you’re not going to see any difference. You’re going to see the same sort of scenarios play out, one in simulation and one in real life.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow, man, I got a ton of questions. I’m trying to organize them into some type of order, but what is the range on something like this?

ANDY LOWERY: But, as usual, I’m going to give you probably an answer that’s a function of your question. So the range is 100% dependent on the size of the system. And you size the system and then therefore the range based upon the target that you’re trying to protect.

So if you’re trying to protect a tank, you’ve seen maybe some videos of first-person viewers with fiber optic tethers on them hitting an Abrams tank in the back and blowing up the tank or whatever. So you get a $3, $4 million tank blown up by a $10,000, $20,000 first-person viewer drone. Those types of systems are like small, right? Or relatively small, like a big toolbox, about as big as a big toolbox. Very dense, the electronics. And then the range though is maybe 50 meters, but a tank’s not going to need much more than about 50 meters by our calculations.

So you’ve got certain size ones that have ranges at that low of a level, and then you have ones that have the need to go much, much bigger than that. If you’re trying to defend a base or an airfield or an embassy or any of those sort of things, then you’re going to need at least what you see in kind of a lot of other different protective systems where you’re out at like SeaWiz. SeaWiz goes out to about 1.5 kilometers. If you look at the nominal range of what a close-in weapon system can defend, it’s about 1.5 kilometers. So we are like defending a ship, need about that size, is about a building size. We need something in that range.

So the big one you see out there that we kind of toured around and take a look at, that one is for the embassies, for the fixed targets — what sometimes they’re called the point defense type applications. Those ones are in that kind of manifold of range.

SHAWN RYAN: So that would basically defend this entire property.

ANDY LOWERY: You could, since it’s mobile, absolutely. Because if you could detect out at 5 or 10 kilometers, then you move the system both on the ground and then with the antenna to kind of protect. And so out to like a half mile, mile, that type of distance, which is what about this property would be, you would be safe.

And if you had a really critical target, you might want two on a property about this size, one having like 180 and 180. Exactly. And then that way you don’t need beam over the house or whatnot — you’ve got one half Leonidas, this guy, one half Leonidas, this guy. And to your question earlier, you can take the beams and steer them in the same direction, point them at the same target, and it doesn’t quite double up, but it gives you about 50 or 60% more range by having two systems.

So the seams, like if you had two on the left and right of your house right now, the seam down the middle is where people would think to go, but that seam is covered as well or even better than coming right at the system. So we try to make a very sort of robust shield, if you will, so that nothing can get through. And we’re that final last line.

Effects on Humans and Detection Capabilities

SHAWN RYAN: What would this do to a human?

ANDY LOWERY: Nothing. Like, I would stand in — I tell people, there’s a famous — one of my sort of fans from the nuclear Navy was Admiral Rickover. He was like one of the greatest entrepreneurs in the world, created the entire nuclear program in like 4 years for subs and our surface ships and all of that. And there’s a famous scene where Admiral Rickover goes into Congress and drinks the effluent of the primary coolant. He drinks down a glass of it to try to illustrate how safe it is.

I was telling someone before we came out here, I said I would stand in front of the main beam, not for like an hour, but I’d stand in front of the main beam for like 15 seconds and go, “Zap me.” It won’t do anything. It won’t. It wouldn’t do a thing to me. And I’ll tell you why. These microwaves — we happen to use frequencies that are so low they’re close to kind of RF. They’re still microwave. They’re considered microwave, but they’re almost in the RF or radio frequency band of waves. And those waves pass harmlessly through us. Those are the kind of radio towers and stuff like that. The very, very long wavelength, very, very low frequency waves. Those frequencies are not harmful to humans. They just pass right through us and pass right through biologics, not harmful to plants, not harmful to birds.

We are a little bit above that, but not much. So we do have to be somewhat safety conscious. We have to do HERO, HERP, HERF — these different hazardous electromagnetic radiation for personnel. There’s these limits that are very, very tight and very tightly controlled. We have to be below those by measure, but it’s not hard for us to be below them. We’re well below them and you can stand very close to the machine and not have any sort of effects whatsoever.

SHAWN RYAN: Okay. And it’s not radiating any microwaves unless it detects something, correct?

ANDY LOWERY: Exactly. So even if you do radiate, it might be 20 seconds or 10 seconds of radiation, then it’s off again. The drones are down.

SHAWN RYAN: Okay. And so when it does detect something — if you could visualize, if you could see the beam, what would it look like? Would it look like a laser? Would it look like a blast wave? What would it look like?

ANDY LOWERY: It would not look like a laser. It would look more like — it’s about — let me think about this, how to say this right without giving away too much. It’s nowhere near as thin of a beam as a laser. It’s a thicker beam. And if you look at it — it would look like a spotlight. Like a — oh, that’s a great analogy. It’s about like a spotlight. Yeah, like a spotlight that you would see. Yes, that’s absolutely dead on. That is a great way of looking at it. Like the spotlight you see in the parking lots to say, “Hey, come over here,” and they shine up in the sky and they zoom them around and make different sorts of things. That’s about — in the microwave frequencies — exactly what the beam would look like.

SHAWN RYAN: How many of those beams can it shoot? Just —

ANDY LOWERY: We keep it at just one because we want to eke out every bit of power we can. We don’t want to distribute the beams into a bunch of beams. But we move it at microsecond speeds. So it’s hard for a human to even think about this, just like the lights in this room are blinking on and off right now, but we can’t see them. And that’s only at 60 hertz. We’re at a much, much faster repetition rate, so we can basically go around this whole 60 degrees by 60 degrees and fill the sky with pulsating electromagnetic interference energy. And a drone anywhere in that big sort of section of the sky would fall.

SHAWN RYAN: It’s so fast, it just looks like it’s happening all simultaneous, all at the exact same time — it looks like a blast wave.

ANDY LOWERY: Exactly. To the physical system, like if you were on the drone — like a little guy inside the drone driving it — you would just see, no matter if you were here, here, here, you would see this electromagnetic pulsating wave just hitting you and hitting you and hitting you, like as if you took that spotlight that you made the reference to and just had a guy that in one second could just run that spotlight across the whole sky.

Drone Detection and Engagement

SHAWN RYAN: Sh. How does it detect the drones?

ANDY LOWERY: It does it through a combination of radar and electro-optical and infrared. So we have 3 bands of frequencies. We have the radar, which goes out, and it’s pretty high-frequency radar because it has to find these little drones as far a distance as we can find them. So we start with like a 360-degree radar and we’re searching and we’re searching, or we’re tapped into Andra Lattis, and Lattis is doing the searching and then handing us, “Hey, we found something, we’re going to assign it to you.”

But in the standalone situation where we’re doing everything, we search about maybe a 10-kilometer to 20-kilometer space. We see things way out as they’re coming in. And then as soon as we see them, we’re starting to move or position our system to be able to take the attack. But we’re not firing until it gets in that kind of final sort of layer — where we don’t try to hit them way out at 10 miles or 5 miles. It’s in that last sort of engagement zone.

So other things are handling — other layers are handling the further out fight. We’re sitting back just like a goalie in a hockey game, just pointed, ready, ready, ready, ready to stop, ready to stop. We get either the assignment or if we’re a standalone, we give ourselves the assignment. It’s locked on to by our telescope — basically, it’s an electro-optical and infrared telescope. Some of the videos online, you can see the infrared version of that telescope. So it locks on to it very tightly. We hit the trigger, it goes on for about 2 seconds. Every drone in the sky falls down. Very, very quickly.

SHAWN RYAN: How big of a drone could you take out? Something like a Predator drone? How big of a machine can you disable?

ANDY LOWERY: The theory applies and scales to anything with electronics. However, as you get bigger and bigger drones, you’re able to get bigger and bigger weight capacities, and you can do a lot of things with electromagnetic shielding. So even drones that fly at 100,000 feet, they have cosmic radiation and electromagnetic fields that have to be shielded against.

And this is actually — on one side you go, “Oh, shoot, you can’t get those big drones.” But on the other side, we’re also not taking out airplanes or 747s or anything. Like, it’s super safe because of the kind of controlled short-range nature of the system.

So it works really, really well against Group 1 and Group 2s. These harassing first-person viewers — that is what it was designed for. It was a drone Group 1, Group 2 goalie stop. We have tested against some Group 3s. We have lots of commercial information around, and commercial testing around bigger systems that enterprising people pick up out of the field in Ukraine that get downed. And then we buy those commercially and we test our system to see the viability.

And it does seem to have good effects, at least in a chamber where we test it. We haven’t flown a Shahed at it or anything like that. We don’t have any Shahed pilots and don’t have a Shahed that’s operational. So we rig up the systems that we have and we’re able to gain access to, and we test in the chamber how our system would affect the system out in the field.

And we have kind of math equations that are really accurate, like within 5%. If we can down the drone inside of our chamber at such a distance or a calculated distance, then it equates to that same distance out in the field. So we do believe they will be effective against Group 3s. It is effective against Group 3s, but I caution everyone to say nothing is a panacea. There’s always need for layers. There’s always need for more than just one set of stopping things. You have to have other different types of systems in order to be safe and get everything.

The Future of Drone Warfare

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, if this is as successful as you think it’s going to be, or than it is, this would — I mean, this would make drone warfare obsolete. Obsolete at some point in time, probably in the near future, correct?

ANDY LOWERY: If we do what I hope we’re able to do, it will change the face of drone warfare completely. Now, I’m not saying it will obsolete it, because this is a chess game or cat and mouse game, where they build a bigger mousetrap and they figure out a better mouse, and you just go back and forth, back and forth. I think if you ask anyone who’s an expert in electronic warfare — that is all of electronic warfare, like next-generation jammer — we might be jamming something at 150 miles, and then all of a sudden they change the physical construction of the radar and it can’t jam it but 75 miles out. So you’re always playing this — who’s got the lead, who’s got the upper hand, the enemy or us, the enemy, then us.

But with that said, this is a game changer. It is a game changer. It’s going to force our adversaries back into normal — more back into normal lanes where they’re not attacking data centers and civilian-type targets and all of that. We’ll be able to build enough of, I think, a robust network with our system and others that are emerging onto the market that will cripple the ability for bad actors to be able to use drones. It will really cripple them.

And so what about nukes?

The Golden Dome and Drone Defense Technology

SHAWN RYAN: A lot of big talk right now. Iran, Russia, China. Been going on forever, right? A lot of fear about nuclear war though. There has been for probably since the Ukraine War kicked off, which was what, ’22 maybe? But could they be repurposed, or is the technology there to develop baseline technology there to develop an Iron Dome that would defend against this?

ANDY LOWERY: I would say that the best use for the Golden Dome — Iron Dome, or Golden Dome, as President Trump and the team has been calling it, the Golden Dome — those are a whole bunch of different, very important systems like THAAD systems, Patriot missile systems, and a network that networks all of that together in this much larger air picture.

Now, I’ll say that those systems have been shown to be vulnerable against mice. The nukes are the lions. The nuclear ballistic missiles are lions. And in fact, a lot of the ballistic missiles are what exactly what they say. They go way up into outer space, and then they calculate exactly where they need to drop their little bombs, and they got like a bunch of them inside a warhead, and then they just drop these things.

These, they’re ballistic, they’re not electronically steering, they’re not doing — they’re using all this really high math to figure out, okay, if we drop it right here at this time in this direction and launch it there, it’ll fall to the Earth and hit or explode in the atmosphere, just depending on the type of nuke. So they’re tough, it’s a tough problem to stop ballistics, and you really want to get at as close to the launch as you can. Like, you want to be able to have your target hit their rocket before their rocket even gets a chance to ballistically drop those missiles and stuff like that. So it’s a little bit different equation.

I can’t visualize how it would help in that mission right now. But where I can visualize it will help, it will protect the protector. So as we set up THAADs and we set up these different bases, we should have our systems and other systems like ours protecting those type of things from a Jersey drone type. Like if you have a Chinese boat with a bunch of containers off the shore, send in a swarm of drones like the Ukrainians did in Operation Spiderweb. You have that last lane of defense so that your big missiles and your big sort of defensive type systems aren’t being taken out.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow, man. Warfare is changing totally so much.

ANDY LOWERY: It is really changing.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. Like it was yesterday I was at war that I wouldn’t even recognize it today.

ANDY LOWERY: Oh, it’s the same. Like I was telling someone when I was in the Navy, when I’d go out overseas, I’d bring warfighters like you over there, but I was just driving the airport, running the nuclear plants underneath. And when my wife would say, “Are you going to be hurt? You’re going to be injured?” I said, “No, no, we’re sitting on an airport, way out in the water. There’s no way anything’s getting to us. We’re inland. Those are the guys having all the risk.”

You can’t say that anymore. Everything’s a target now. Ships have pretty good close-in defensive networks like the Sea Whizzes we were talking about earlier and all that, but it’s not improbable or even unimaginable for a carrier or something like that to become susceptible to a drone attack. It just is a new way of warfare.

Deployment and Scalability of Drone Defense Systems

SHAWN RYAN: So where will these be utilized? I mean, I know you guys have some that are already out in the field, but are these going to be on every naval vessel, every overseas FOB base, every embassy, over the White House? I mean, it’s everything. You mentioned everything from tanks to entire bases.

ANDY LOWERY: Yeah, I think there is a potentiality for these types of systems, and as they evolve into more and more and better capabilities, for them to become almost as ubiquitous as radars. I mean, when we built radars back in the ’40s and ’50s, there was a lot of people poo-pooing them saying, “Oh, radars are just a fad. They’re going to come and go.” But now radars are everywhere. They’re like everywhere. Everybody has a radar. I had a radar on my little Ranger tug for a while in the Columbia River. Radars just become commodity.

I think this type of technology very may well be a commodity type technology. If we continue to live in a world where bad actors are using these toys and these mice, as we call them, to get out of the normal lanes of warfare to try to use these things to create terror-type stuff — even if the war ends in 2 or 3 weeks, that doesn’t end, right? We don’t end the Houthis hurting people in the Red Sea and trying to mess up our shipping lanes. It doesn’t end people trying to throw drones into American bases over in that region, other bad actors.

I think even if we pull out the big guns and we go back or whatever in a few weeks from now, there’s going to be at least a many, many year sort of tail to this, that drones and this mice warfare is going to be really prevalent, especially in that region.

Cost Per Shot: The Economics of Directed Energy

SHAWN RYAN: How much will something like — I mean, at the beginning earlier we said a $2 million missile to take out a $500 drone. What do these cost? What does each shot cost? I mean, it’s just energy. So I don’t know what that equates to.

ANDY LOWERY: Yeah, we have — and this is something that is very relevant and we’re doing right now with the Department of War. We’re showing them basically each and every sort of perturbation, what you just asked.

So a system, just a standalone system, the big ones like the ones you see out there — depending on how you outfit them, what kind of sensors you’re using — they can go from anywhere from the mid-teens to upwards to $20 million or more if you want all the bells and whistles and stuff. So they’re not cheap. They’re not cheap to buy the system, but then every drone thereon after is pennies. It’s literally pennies. The fuel that it takes us to take down an individual drone costs just a few cents — $0.05, $0.10, $0.20, something like that.

If you combine those two, then it becomes an equation of how many drones are you taking out in a given month, in a given year, utilizing that system? And if you take out, let’s say, 50 drones in a month, it becomes dollars. Even, you know, you’re like hundreds of dollars per drone versus — and that’s counting all that, between $10 and $20 million of costs and all of that. All in, you’re still down at hundreds of dollars per shot once you start to have utilization of the system.

So there’s two ways that someone would decide to use our system. One, it would be a lot cheaper than going the missile routes because if I’m using it all the time, it’s going to get a lot of utility and that’s going to drive my price per shot way, way, way down. So then that big sort of bill upfront is much, much littler. Or either one, that you’re going to drive that cost per shot down, or two, you’re going to understand that that target that you’re defending, even if it doesn’t get like a million drones a day or whatever, if that target even has a chance of being attacked by drones, it’s so valuable you don’t even want the chance to happen.

So I think those are going to be the two really sort of robust applications we get at right away — where either one, they’re going to protect something extremely important and vital to be protected at all costs, or two, it’ll be a very high op tempo of many, many drones flying in per day, and then that’ll drive the cost way down.

If you want to stick a big expensive thing like this in some port in Louisiana or something like that on the Gulf, it’ll probably be overkill at this point. Still, as we start driving costs down as we start to scale and we start to get into production, then they become more and more ubiquitous. But first movers and first users will probably be very high-value targets at this point in time.

Miniaturization: From Base Defense to Squad-Level Protection

SHAWN RYAN: I’m just curious, how small do you think you can make this thing? I know it’s probably not a high priority right now, but I’m just wondering — I just had this Ukrainian drone operator actually show up here and he hunted me down on the property. I’ve never been involved in drone warfare; it was not a thing during my time, right, other than Predators, and another problem, but not FPV drones running me down. And throughout that exercise, it got my mind jogging. Would this be a squad defense weapon potentially for a team of special operators?

ANDY LOWERY: Yeah, it very well could. We have a system that we designed, prototypes. We never got into production with it, but we have several prototypes of something about the size of a toolbox, weighs about 40 pounds. So it’s not light, but you could get a soldier to carry it or you could get a couple of people to move it around with a squad.

The range is limited. That’s the issue. Like if you want to have something the size of a toolbox and go 50, 100, 200 meters or something like that — that’s right now with where the technology is, that’s really not possible, other than if you had a whole bunch of those boxes and you were pointing them all at the same thing, then you could start getting sort of into those type of ranges. But that’s been a real hard one.

You’ve seen out on the news maybe these drone guns that the folks have. Those are electronic warfare, those are jammers. They’re trying to use jamming to kind of — if the bad actor isn’t sophisticated or if it’s a hobbyist or whatever, the drone guns work pretty good. We’re looking at if we could design something like a drone gun, like a drone bazooka maybe, where we could have an individual basically hit something at 50 meters or 100 meters that just is in close in sight. I think it’s possible.

SHAWN RYAN: Okay.

ANDY LOWERY: I think the first step — and we’re working alongside Andrel on a bunch of things — but one of the things we’ve looked at is, and I heard Joe talk about this, their Roadrunner vehicle that does the vertical land, sort of like Elon’s rockets or whatever. It’s a really, really cool system. And it has a small little payload section that if Palmer can get his Roadrunner in 6, 8 feet, 9, 10 yards, something like that — between 3 to 10 yards from a target — then we can EPM, we can electromagnetic pulse it, falls, move on to the next one, move on to the next one. There’s an application for that kind of a potential. So you could have maybe a drone you could launch with a squad and go up and project that range that way.

If you can’t tolerate the littler range that you’re going to get on a smaller system, we’re right now in process of taking our electronics and making them much smaller, much denser to make the power density go way up. And the primary driver of that is vehicle protection. So we’ve kind of been working our way down. We’ve gone from kind of the larger fixed and semi-fixed site type protection with the bigger system.

And we have a medium system that the Marines want to use for some of their platoons and sort of like expeditionary units and things like that that have drone problems. But they could bring them with them on a JLTV or some other vehicle that they have in their arsenal. That’s the medium size. And then the small size is for individual vehicle protections like the tanks like we were talking about earlier.

We haven’t quite kicked off yet an individual soldier protection, although we’re getting tons of pressure and tons of requests out of the Army to do that. They really want to get it down to kind of an individual soldier level that has something other than what they have today to protect themselves.

Operational Applications and the Leonidas AGV Demo

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, I actually— I didn’t even mean for the individual soldier, but I mean, if you were to do something like the bin Laden, you know, where they could just roll a vehicle up. Maybe it’s attached to the helicopter that lands, maybe it’s on a vehicle, maybe it’s a f*ing backpack that you just set right in the middle of the target, and then it gives you— you don’t have to worry about FPV drones, you know, coming to mess with you while you’re trying to pull a hostage out.

ANDY LOWERY: Well, I’ll even give you one better. You could take that system and point it at the wall that you’re about to bust through, or the door you’re about to bust through, and knock out all the computers, all the different things inside. I mean, it again works on everything. So drones, yes, but it also will work if Bin Laden’s sitting there on his computer network — take out his computers, everything goes dark in his room, and then boom, the explosion happens, they go in and get him.

So it has a ton of applications when we start looking at special ops and some of the three-letter agencies and stuff. It’s got just a ton of adjacent applications other than just drone stop. You can stop vehicles with this thing. So imagine a cop with a system on the hood of a car — one of the medium or small size systems — chasing after someone, stopping them by hitting them with electromagnetic energy, the car engine shuts down, they calmly and easily take the guy in.

Or someone running a gate, right, trying to do a run of the gate. Typically some tragedies have happened where we’ve had to just shoot those folks that have gone off the deep end and tried to charge into a gate with a vehicle. You could create a system that stops vehicles with electromagnetic energy prior to having to do small arms fire on an individual doing that.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow.

ANDY LOWERY: Jet skis in ports — that’s another one that is a big problem. Jet skis running around ships and stuff in port. Don’t shoot the jet ski, just shoot it with a little electromagnetic energy, turn off the jet ski, and arrest the perpetrator.

SHAWN RYAN: Who is operating these? Is this operated by AI? Is it an individual operator?

ANDY LOWERY: It’s a range. I think CWIS is a really good example. I used to be a Combat Information Center officer on the Incheon — that was my first ship where I got my SWO pin and stuff. It had 3 modes of operation. It has a man in the loop, which is just manual. You have man on the loop, where the system will go through and give you a recommendation and say, “We recommend this course of action,” and you say yes or say no and change. And then you have fully auto, just like in a SeaWiz, where you’re just like, the world is crashing down, I’ve got 1,000 drones from every direction coming in and I just wouldn’t even have time — I’ve got to save myself. And you put it in full auto and it does it all.

SHAWN RYAN: Right on. You ready to go take a look at this thing?

ANDY LOWERY: Let’s do it.

Up Close with the Leonidas AGV

SHAWN RYAN: All right, so we’re out here with Andy Lowery, and we got the Leonidas right behind us on a truck with all kinds of whiz-bangs on it. What are we looking at here?

ANDY LOWERY: Well, we debuted — this is our Leonidas AGV, autonomous ground vehicle. And what we have is a full-size system like we were talking about, ones that would be appropriate against maybe a base defense or something larger range. But now this is made to be mobile.

Now, 3 companies came together to make this mobile. One, EPRIS — see the big antenna. Two, General Dynamics Land Systems. And three, Kodiak Defense. Kodiak Defense provides the autonomy, so they’re kind of doing the Waymo of this truck. So this truck can drive with a driver or without, just like a Waymo car — drive around wherever you need it, drive by wire, or drive autonomously.

Position the system wherever you need to. Let’s say we get a detection 10 kilometers away on your property — here comes some hostile drones. The thing can start up, drive itself over, start to close on those drones, get closer and closer, stop, position the antenna, take out — wow — all in one package.

You’ve got two radar panels on the bumper here — Echodyne radar, high frequency, very much tuned to drone detection. And then on the top of the roof, you see two more panels. Those are Echodyne radars. You have four panels that give you 360-degree situational awareness, surveying everything. And then you see cameras all along for the autonomy by the rearview mirrors there.

On top you have a Starlink antenna, and then some UHF antennas for communication. So you’re getting everything — this is totally a live node, if you will, a node on the battlefield. And then the antenna itself, of course, is your electromagnetic interference field creator that’s going to take and position it wherever it needs to position, then form a wall or a shield of energy.

So this is a really big request on the Army side. The Army really said to me, “Look, it’s great, we like the technology, but it needs to be mobile.” It’s just the way the Army’s going. They want everything to be maneuverable. As they’re starting to defend different bases, they’re realizing that mobility is a necessity. And then two, the Army has said that when the range is limited and they can’t get far enough out, they can power project forward. They can move the mobile system out forward to the front line and then from there get another half a mile or a mile out in order to stop the drones.

SHAWN RYAN: Right on. So four radars, two Starlink dishes.

ANDY LOWERY: Some UHF antennas on top.

SHAWN RYAN: UHF antennas.

ANDY LOWERY: And then some cameras and automated systems. You can see these 360-degree cameras and servos and all of that. This is like what you see on a Waymo car — they’re just made to be militarized for this particular system.

SHAWN RYAN: Okay.

ANDY LOWERY: So you can imagine a guy in this passenger seat will have a laptop where he’ll have full situational awareness. He might have Lattice running on his laptop by Anduril — full situational awareness of where everything’s happening, where other effectors might be. And then when an assignment comes in for this particular system, if a guy is inside, he might be in a container somewhere just running everything automatically. But if there is a manual operator, he’d get all of that information inside the cab and then be able to drive the thing wherever he needs to drive to protect whatever he needs to protect.

SHAWN RYAN: So if this is fully autonomous, and this thing decides it needs to be all the way over there, it will just drive itself over there and then position the antenna in the way that it needs to be positioned to take out the threat?

ANDY LOWERY: Absolutely. Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: And then talk about this antenna here.

How the Phased Array Antenna Works

ANDY LOWERY: So the antenna itself — you can see if you measured it right now, it’s about 10 foot by 8 foot where you see that square right on top of where the sticker sits. Behind that antenna are hundreds of individual elements. They look like little square silver boxes, and there’s hundreds of them back behind here.

And phasing — they call it phasing — all of those up. What you do is each one puts out a little bit of energy, a little bit of energy, a little bit of energy, and you take all of that energy and phase it up into one tremendously strong beam and then push that beam out into the atmosphere. And that’s what causes the electromagnetic interference field, or the directed energy field, that causes all the problems with any sort of electronics.

So it’s not easy. Think about it — we are creating, out of a machine made out of electronics, something that disables any electronics from being able to fly or being able to operate from hundreds of meters, if not kilometers, away without kind of self-destroying ourselves and taking ourselves offline. There’s a tremendous amount of innovation when it comes to shielding, when it comes to protecting the circuits from getting their own electromagnetic interference energy back on top of it. So that’s why it’s so state-of-the-art, and that’s why I think it’s so unique — we’re taking into consideration things that just really have never been done before, or even attempted before, for that matter.

SHAWN RYAN: Is this the— so would the beam be about the size of the rectangle here, or—

ANDY LOWERY: No, the beam would be smaller than the rectangle, because right behind the rectangle are hundreds of those elements. If we pulled that rectangle off, you’d see hundreds of them. The beam would come down to be about 10 degrees or so — between 5 and 10 degrees is where your beam is going to get shaped.

SHAWN RYAN: So they all just go like this?

ANDY LOWERY: Yeah, they’re connected. And then if you think about it — on the water, if you had one wavemaker making waves, and then you had another wavemaker making waves, you try to time them up so those waves start to stack on top of each other. But like 100 times over — if you had 100 water wavemakers making a wave in the water, and you timed them such that every wave crested at the exact same point and fell at the exact same point, you could create a huge wave. If you imagine hundreds of those wavemakers, you could create a huge wave out of a bunch of little waves if you just time the sequencing and the pulsing of those waves at the same time.

That’s exactly what we do inside a microwave system, but the waves are moving much quicker. They’re in microwaves, not in water. But timing those waves so that each one of those peaks and each one of those valleys line up, and then forming it into a very narrow — for the size of the system — narrow beam that we then move around electronically by, again, timing those waves in sequence so that the system goes left, goes to the right, goes up, goes down.

Then on top of that electronic steering, we have our mechanical steering where we can spin this thing around. It goes around about each second — it’ll cover about 30 degrees of rotation. So it moves very quickly. And every time we see a drone, even if we start with an electronic scan, and then turn the antenna to follow—

SHAWN RYAN: Gotcha—

ANDY LOWERY: —so that we get the biggest punch for the system that we can possibly get. Because when you’re face-on like this, this is when the antenna is the most powerful. So as this moves around, nobody’s detecting it, nobody’s seeing where it’s at, doesn’t even know that this system can shoot down drones. Drones appear, we shoot them down, then we move the system away from where it just happened so it doesn’t become a target. Because sooner or later people will start saying, “Hey, we can’t get any drones through if they’ve got one of these Leonidas sitting out there.” And if that happens, we’re going to want to move the system so that it doesn’t become a target.

SHAWN RYAN: Gotcha. And so these radars that you have up top and these two back here — that’s what picks up the threat. And then this, the bad boy right here, the Leonidas, which shoots it down. What is the operator seeing—

ANDY LOWERY: What—

SHAWN RYAN: When—

ANDY LOWERY: So the operator sees like a god view of the landscape. So they will have like Google Earth and see your entire landscape here, and then on top of that, layered on top of that, are the different drones. And they get kind of all pulled in through the Starlink, all networked in that same network. It can see all the drones, not only the drones right over your place where our radars might be detecting it, but if there’s drones in your neighbor’s yard and they have a radar that’s on the same network, it’ll see the drones even starting from over there.

So we get a really big— we try to get the biggest heads up as we possibly can to make sure that we’re minimizing the need for like hundreds of these to surround your property. We want to have early detection, early observation, move the system into the optimal place to defend it, and then defend the place as a last line of defense.

SHAWN RYAN: Is the distance that the radars can detect the drones the same distance that this is max effective range? Of the Leonidas? So when you detect a drone, can you immediately shoot it down, is basically what I’m asking?

ANDY LOWERY: The detection range is longer, so you’ll get detection of the drones, hopefully. I mean, sometimes you won’t, if a bad actor decided to hide a drone in the weeds over here and it just popped up, we’d detect it and be able to shoot it in the same distance. But in a, let’s say in a desert, you might have a landscape that you can see out to. You might detect a drone at 20 kilometers. You might detect a drone at least 10 kilometers — you’ll be able to detect a drone. This one will just position itself and get ready to take the drones down when given the assignment. And then when it comes in around 2 kilometers or something, that’s when we start engaging, at about 2 kilometers.

SHAWN RYAN: Sh. Damn, this is awesome.

How the Leonidas System Works

ANDY LOWERY: You see, we have these cables. This is where all the DC power is being fed up into the system. So you take AC power, alternate current power, so you get a generator like power in your house, it’s at 60 Hz. You take that, you convert it back in the back end to DC. These DC cables bring the DC up into the columns, and then once that DC power is in the columns all stored up, it sends it into what we call the LRAMs, those boxes.

Those LRAMs are magical converters that convert that DC power into RF power, microwave power, using — if you remember, I’ll quiz you — gallium nitride. Yeah, using gallium nitride in order to do that conversion. So that’s the magic rocks, if you will, a magic material that’s able to take massive amounts of power and convert that power to a massive high-powered microwave system. Or microwave energy.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow. Let’s take a— I just want to take a peek at the front. I haven’t seen the front yet.

ANDY LOWERY: On the front—

SHAWN RYAN: Damn, that is badass looking. Look at that thing.

ANDY LOWERY: Yeah, that— you feel protected just seeing it, you know? Wait till it operates and people are like, “What?”

SHAWN RYAN: Oh man, I would love to see that. Yeah, I would love to see that.

ANDY LOWERY: Well, we’re getting close to being a lot more liberally able to shoot it. The FAA is very interested in seeing these things deployed. They feel safe with this sort of a system versus some of the kinetics. And even the laser systems can give people worry when you’re shooting them over like El Paso or whatever. Like, they had to shut down that airport a couple times when they had a laser system or whatever down there. This system wouldn’t need to shut down any airports. It wouldn’t have any sort of issues just operating alongside other radars and other — it’s kind of like a high-powered radar more than it is any kind of traditional directed energy system.

SHAWN RYAN: Man, that is really cool, really cool. And you’re getting ready to crank out how many of these?

ANDY LOWERY: We’re trying to get this year — by the end of the year, we’re trying to get one a week. So 50 a year, that’ll take us into next year. And then after that, we need to expand. We’re in Southern California, and we’re looking at Oklahoma as where we can build volume, where we can get over 100 a year. So we’re looking at multi systems per week. In California, we think we can manage about one a week. It’s great to see someone so excited about it as I am.

SHAWN RYAN: I said, I’ve been tracking this thing for like 2 or 3 years now. And to have one in the backyard is pretty f*ing crazy. So have you had one in your backyard yet?

ANDY LOWERY: No, no. You have that privilege.

SHAWN RYAN: Right on.

ANDY LOWERY: Interested in a CEO job? I am. Let’s swap me out. I’ll be your CTO.

Debunking Leonidas HPM Myths

SHAWN RYAN: Cool, cool. All right, Andy, we’re back from the break. What an awesome piece of machinery you’ve got out there. But I wanted to go over some myths — debunking Leonidas HPM myths. Which I think we covered some of that, but Havana Syndrome. Are you familiar with Havana Syndrome?

ANDY LOWERY: I’ve heard of what it is and I’ve heard the theories. But again, I don’t know. I don’t have any inside information. I’m just a microwave engineer, directed energy guy with some amount of know-how and could perceive something to be at the right frequency and the right energy and all of that to hurt a human. I mean, obviously microwave ovens — if you stood in a microwave oven, you wouldn’t survive over a few minutes. So there are ways of directing that energy, just like we direct other energies, to probably cause harm to others.

Now, good news is that I don’t need to worry about any of that, even in a sort of a fratricide way with people. It’s very safe, our system. As I kind of talked about earlier, I’d stand right in front of even the main beam for a short amount of time. It’s totally safe. It’s tuned in frequency and in energy — it’s tuned for electronics and not humans. Not only humans, but birds, plants, trees, any of that in the way of the beam won’t be affected at all. You won’t get any damage at all for any types of living creatures.

SHAWN RYAN: Are there any other kind of misunderstandings or myths about Leonidas that you want to address? It will take out the tethered drones. We covered that, correct?

Narrowband vs. Wideband High-Powered Microwave Systems

ANDY LOWERY: Yeah, it takes out tethered drones. I think some people — this is getting a little deep, but I’ll kind of talk about it — and then just for the listeners that maybe understand a little bit more about directed energy and in particular high-powered microwave, there’s two kind of classes, I’ll call them. There’s what’s called wideband high-powered microwave directed energy and narrowband high-powered microwave. And when they say band, they’re talking about the frequency. So how many frequencies does this particular system use or leverage?

Traditionally, historically, narrowband systems have been working sometimes, sometimes not working, working on some targets, but not working on all targets. That’s been historically the impression that directed energy experts have about narrowband systems. Wideband systems, which we started getting at decades ago, leveraged something called vacuum tubes or transmit wave tubes, which are these very sort of simple but very effective amplifiers like gallium nitride, but they amplify in a way that causes you to have to operate the system differently than the way we operate our system. You can’t use the same sort of techniques in the same sort of ways that we operate our system.

The difference between our narrowband system and previous generations and previous ages that they’ve tried this is, one, we have a component of being able to move the narrowband frequency to whatever frequency within a certain bandwidth that we want to move it at. So we can choose and pick. We can go through and say, “Try this frequency, try this frequency, try this frequency, try this frequency.” So we’re trying to match or map the electromagnetic interference to the drone susceptibilities. Some drones may be susceptible to these frequencies, some may not be. Some are susceptible to these frequencies, some others may not be. So we’ve changed sort of the way that narrowband directed energy is used, and we do it in a smart way.

We talked a little bit about AI. A lot of this system has a lot of software-defined AI and other sort of control loops, machine learning and stuff like that that helps with prosecuting these various drones. And that’s the big myth that’s out there.

The second big myth that’s out there is narrowband can’t achieve the very, very high effective radiated powers like some of the traditional systems would have — 2 gigawatts, 3 gigawatts, 4 gigawatts of radiated power. But that’s just not true anymore with gallium nitride. Gallium nitride, built to the right size and shape, can rival the powers of even those traditional systems.

The difference and the advantage of using solid state, which is gallium nitride, is you can also stretch energy, which means time. So power times time equals energy. So what I can do is hold a note, hold a frequency for a long span of time, which traditional directed energy could never do. And I’m leveraging that energy, those huge long pulses. I’m leveraging that energy so that, as you can imagine, a computer has a clock, it’s ticking. You want to be able to overcome many, many clock cycles as you’re trying to get this sort of electromagnetic interference in there.

So that’s a little deep for the folks that understand directed energy, but it is effective. I mean, the proof is the proof. We tested this with the Army for 3 years. We have tested it in many, many different conditions. We’ve deployed it in 2 different regions of the world. We’ve tested it with warfighters. We’ve tested it with real air defenders. This all has been completely put to rest.

Folks that have not checked in with EPRESS for the last 2.5 years, I don’t think realize that. In the early days, there’s a lot of information that got out there in the struggles we were having to get started up and getting booted up. If you look at what we’re delivering today, it’s transformable. It’s just absolutely a different type of system than what we had even 3 or 4 years ago. So systems that are starting to go into production today do work and they work really, really well on what they’re really good at.

Overseas Deployment and Drone Warfare

SHAWN RYAN: Have these deployed overseas?

ANDY LOWERY: They have, yes.

SHAWN RYAN: Can you talk about where?

ANDY LOWERY: On the public domain, people can see that one was in the Philippines on an exercise that we did. This was several months ago.

SHAWN RYAN: Nothing in Ukraine yet?

ANDY LOWERY: Nothing in Ukraine yet. No, we haven’t been able to get through the legal limitations and stuff like that because our system, unlike some of the dual-use drones and the commercial drones and things that are able to easily be sold into Ukraine, our systems are a weapon system. They’re considered what’s called a Category 18 weapon system. Any directed energy system would be categorized as that. And when you have these ITAR systems, they require a little bit more approvals and paperwork in order to get them through the hoops and ladders.

Up until now, we’ve been limited in our ability to do that. Now, this war in the Middle East has kind of changed the game completely. And this administration is aggressively helping us to knock down any barriers to getting our allies protected with these systems, plus our warfighters protected with these systems. And that’s ongoing. I can’t say too many of the details because it gets into operational security — like back when we were in the Navy and we would never tell anyone where our ships are going to move and when they’re going to move.

These are sort of weapon systems that are moving right now, moving into theater, moving in to defend certain allies. And it’s happening. Like right now, like I said earlier, we’re trying to build one a week. If I could build one a week starting today, I’d do it. It’s that big of a demand.

SHAWN RYAN: Can you talk a little bit about drone warfare, whether it’s Ukraine, Middle East? I mean, we don’t see it here in the US much. I think the closest thing we’ve seen is all these damn drones that were up, what, a year ago over New Jersey, which I think wound up being an exercise. But everybody was freaking out when that happened. And I was shouting your guys’ company out. I was like, “This has to be us because we already have the capability to take this sh out.”

ANDY LOWERY: Yeah, but we’re not.

SHAWN RYAN: So it’s—

The Barksdale Incident and the Frozen Middle

ANDY LOWERY: Well, the biggest one that I saw recently — and I’m not at all addressing them as a problem, the Air Force is actually moving very, very quickly with us right now — but there was an incident not too long ago where Barksdale Air Force Base, that has a lot of our nukes and a lot of our strategic bombers, got overflown. It got overflown by swarms of 12 drones at each wave and multiple waves. A wave of 12, a wave of 12, a wave of 12. Totally impervious to jamming, according to the article, according to the news. Totally impervious to jamming. Flew over, surveilled everything, and flew back.

SHAWN RYAN: So where were those from? We don’t know.

ANDY LOWERY: We don’t know. So when you talk about Barksdale, when you talk about those kind of surveillance missions, oh boy, are we perfect for it, because not only would we drop all 12 and the next 12 and the next 12, we don’t damage the system beyond being able to infiltrate and use for forensics and figure those questions out. The system, the computer, if you turn it off and on, works again. The drone is broken because when it hits the ground, the plastics break or whatever, but the computer is still intact.

So we can go trace where those things were coming from and say, “Okay, I got it. Now we understand where these originated from.” So I am very, very encouraged this year that 2026 is going to be the year of Epirus. It’s going to be the year of Leonidas. I think a lot of these things we’re seeing in the news around the corners, they’re going to deploy our systems and we’re going to get to the bottom of a lot of the drone activity we’re starting to see on the United States side as well.

SHAWN RYAN: I can’t believe they don’t have these things deployed already on bases like that.

ANDY LOWERY: Yeah, it’s been a struggle. It’s not all—

SHAWN RYAN: What is the struggle? We had 12 drones come and surveil a nuclear site multiple times and there’s a struggle?

ANDY LOWERY: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: What is the struggle?

ANDY LOWERY: The top of the administration have, for the most part, executed to the theory or the thesis that we need 80%, 90% of the solutions that are ready today — we need them deployed, we need them forward deployed. But there’s still a frozen middle. I’ve talked about this. It’s like the top guys say do it. And if you get in with the frozen middle, or the middle people that actually implement the tactics, there’s a lot of hesitation still, right?

There’s a lot of, “Well, until someone tells me officially I can do this differently, I’m going to do it the same way.” And so there are a lot of people wedded to their old policies or old processes, their old sort of way of acquiring systems and testing systems and wringing out every little risk to get like 99.999% of the risks out. And then when they’re sure of it, they’re ready to go ahead and deploy.

A Wartime Attitude: Lessons from 9/11

SHAWN RYAN: Mm-hmm.

ANDY LOWERY: Well, that’s a peacetime attitude, right? That’s a peacetime attitude. I have some skirmishes, nothing killing any soldiers. I don’t have any injuries going on. I’m not losing any equipment. I’m not at war. We can take our time to run through the different exercises, which we’ve been doing from even before this administration. We were working with the previous administration on these tests and trials and all the rest. But now we’re at war — or conflict, whatever you want to call it. But we are in battle. We are combating with others overseas. That’s a different threshold. I think we need to change our attitude.

I have a pretty interesting story — just a 2-minute story — but it was during 9/11. We were talking about up on the Hill how you joined right before 9/11 when you went into the Navy. I was out at sea during 9/11. We were off the coast of San Diego about 100 miles on the John C. Stennis. We had no planes, no jets. I was running the nuclear plants. The two towers get hit. We get the order to go as fast as that aircraft carrier can possibly go to get off the coast of Los Angeles. Meantime, they’re scrambling Marines out of Miramar with Sidewinder missiles on F-18s and flying them out. We had no steam in the catapults. I had to get steam to the catapults. I had to heat everything up really, really quickly.

The transformation of my sailors — I have never witnessed before or after anything like it. When we got hit, every person, every lady, every sailor snapped into a new — like a superhuman — running around, knowing every one of their procedures, knowing exactly how to move. And within a few hours, we’re flying basically escorts of every jumbo jet coming in from overseas that hadn’t landed yet in LAX. We’re escorting every single one of them down.

Now, the same thing happens with the United States in almost every battle that I’ve ever seen. We are, culturally speaking, underdogs. We are, culturally speaking, the team that when gets socked in the head goes crazy and just responds. And I saw that with the sailors back there on the Stennis. I saw that when we did the MRAPs, when we had the IED problem in 2008. That was an incredible, almost Oppenheimer-like thing that people don’t know about — that the Army assault right now, Brent Ingraham, led that whole thing like a modern-day Oppenheimer. He went from 2008 where they were spending like $160 million on armored vehicles and such to billions in just a year. In one year, they changed that whole face of that dynamic of the IEDs hurting our soldiers.

So we are able to do this. I think now is our moment. We don’t want to let off the gas pedal. Even if the major war and the major bombing all cease and we come back, we want to still treat this like a dangerous situation where we need to field and defend ourselves against this persistent, persistent threat that certainly, in at least my vision, I can’t see it going away. I can only see it getting worse.

The Drone Threat: Everywhere and Growing

SHAWN RYAN: Me neither. I mean, the utility of this thing — I think they’re going to be everywhere.

ANDY LOWERY: They’re so easy.

SHAWN RYAN: I think there’s the potential for them. I mean, we saw what is Operation Spiderweb, the drone — it’s just all over Ukraine. And I don’t know how — we just talked about 12 flying over a nuclear site. I mean, I feel like potentially every stadium, shopping mall, anywhere there could be a terror threat, to be honest with you. But I don’t know how realistic that is. We can’t even harden our schools. But I think — it’s every military base, CIA, NSA, White House, Capitol Hill, state capitals.

ANDY LOWERY: It’s a maneuver. It’s a maneuver against what we see as this totally asymmetrical vector. We have an asymmetrical vector. We need to put a piece on the chessboard that lets those guys know it’s not free-for-all time anymore. We’re going to knock down your drones. We’re going to infiltrate those drones and we’re coming to find you. It’s one thing to stop the bees from stinging, but there’s another to find the queen bee where the nest is and stop them.

And when we start doing that, it may not need the total ubiquity of every single station, everything, because we’ll start getting to the source of the issues. But we need our system, we need other systems like ours, we need direction-finding systems, we need other surveillance systems. That whole network of layers — our system provides a key, key component that’s going to level the playing field, or not only level the playing field, I would say upend the playing field, to put them on the, “Oh boy, how are we going to fly these drones in and do this?” when they see these systems standing up around a stadium, for example.

Advantages, Disadvantages, and the Zero-to-One Challenge

SHAWN RYAN: Are there any disadvantages to this system versus a kinetic one or a laser one?

ANDY LOWERY: Well, I would say kinetics go further — like Coyote, for example, by Raytheon. They have a longer range. That’s an advantage of kinetics over our system. When you’re talking about similar ranges, kinetics are known quantities. This is kind of like invisible rays. The Army is traditionally bullets-orientated, moving in that direction. Air Force and Navy are a little bit more comfortable with new electronic warfare type modalities and stuff. But Army is pretty comfortable too — absolutely fascinated and want to invest and want to move forward with us.

But to answer your question more straightforwardly, that’s its big disadvantage — it’s a zero-to-one. It’s like when Peter Thiel wrote that book Zero to One. It’s a zero-to-one system. It’s a technology people don’t understand. That’s why I appreciate being on the show to try to explain it. And people are afraid of what they don’t understand — either afraid it won’t work, afraid it’s going to hurt people. And we’ve dispelled a lot of that.

If you look at the facts and data and all the stuff we’ve done over the last couple of years, we’ve dispelled almost all of those worries and all of those risks. And now it’s a chance to just get some wartime kills, get it out there, get it in battle, and put it to the test. And if I’m wrong, I’m wrong, but you’re not going to spend that much more money by getting it out there, getting it in the battlefield. And I don’t think that’s a “hey, let’s go challenge and do that” — it’s like happening. This war is driving us to that.

Closing Thoughts: Magazine Depth and the China Drone Threat

SHAWN RYAN: Well, it is very impressive what you guys put together out there. Very impressive. Is there anything I haven’t asked you that I should be asking you when it comes to Leonidas or Epirus?

ANDY LOWERY: We’ve covered a lot. One other thing that it advantages — so we’ve talked about the collateral damage and it being a very safe system. So you can use it in homeland, whereas kinetics you can’t use in homeland in all situations without putting a lot of danger to houses and residential types of neighborhoods. So kinetics don’t make for a good solution for the homeland. They make a good solution overseas in some cases.

But the problem isn’t just cost. We talked a lot about cost, but it’s also magazine depth. We only have a certain amount of missiles and a certain amount of production capacity to build new missiles. And it’s very difficult. It’s not like drones where you can just — I think I read somewhere that China can make 30 million drones a year. There’s nothing we can make 30 million of in the military lane. So we have a real magazine depth disadvantage as well by continuing to try to pursue drones with some of the tried and true kind of Lion-type weapons and defensive weapons and stuff like that. Those are not easily reproducible and producible, and they have a long tail. When you say, “Hey, I need another 10,000 of these Coyotes,” Raytheon — it takes a while to spin up and get that capacity and get that out to the field. So not just cost asymmetry, but magazine depth asymmetry as well.

30 million drones a year, I heard. I mean, I wouldn’t be surprised. When you have a kind of an authoritarian Communist Party that can go in and tell a factory, “Hey, you’re not building laptops, you’re building drones,” do that to several places in Chongqing — man, I just have never heard that stat before.

SHAWN RYAN: That’s alarming.

ANDY LOWERY: It is alarming. And they’re right north of Iran, right? I mean, they could be helping outfit those guys. Read about it in the news as well — Russia giving them targeting information and such. And so it’s an asymmetrical fight, and we are less equipped than others to start engaging. But it’s our moment. I don’t say that with negativity in my mind. I think of it just like the 9/11 moment. It’s our moment to be the underdog, to turn the whole thing over on its head and get at these bad actors.

SHAWN RYAN: I love it. I love what you guys are building. And man, it makes me—

ANDY LOWERY: When we start hitting some real wartime shootdowns, I’ll have to come back on your show and we can talk about how well they’re working once they get deployed.

SHAWN RYAN: I’d love to do that. I’m sure we’re not far off, so.

ANDY LOWERY: Absolutely.

SHAWN RYAN: Perfect. Well, Andy, thank you so much for being here.

ANDY LOWERY: Thank you.

SHAWN RYAN: No matter where you’re watching The Shawn Ryan Show from, if you get anything out of this at all, anything, please like, comment, and subscribe. And most importantly, share this everywhere you possibly can. And if you’re feeling extra generous, head to Apple Podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review.

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