Valuable information for any DevTech VC’s, if you own a full capability stack, you might not need to bring it inside the wire…
I have number of defense industry friends who have called me up recently asking for solutions to the same hard problem. This was super useful for them, and since the DoD needs a better way to integrate capabilities holistically, I want to share this concept more broadly for applicable utilization. My friends were all looking for ways to rapidly integrate commercial capabilities with military customers, and the answer is surprising simple…plain text outputs.
The Simple Concept:
1. The military already has very robust, and well developed chat messaging systems with multi-network transport capabilities.
2. The commercial world now provides full stack capability solutions for many actions (sensor>datalink>algorithm>detection)
3. Let the commercial system do its full function to produce the detections of value, and provide that resulting actionable intelligence to the military customer via a secure commercial endpoint in plain text output format.
The military customer can manually (human copy/paste) or automatically (via software automation) retrieve that Intel from your endpoint, and because it’s just simple plain text data from a commercial system (still unclassified at this stage) it can be easily & securely (plain text being the easiest to verify doesn’t contain malicious code) be transferred into a NIPRNET chat system for rapid dissemination to any military (or foreign partner) customer at any classification level anywhere in the world in seconds. It’s a trivial matter to convert the received plain text on the distant-end military network to a COP, datalink, or other military specific system for additional utilization.
We never really did this much in the past because the commercial world didn’t have an abundance full stack capabilities on offer that were better than military equivalents. There was always a need to utilize some or often many military components as part of the capability stack. Times have changed, and many of the most capable systems across many domains are entirely commercially owned and operated. The DoD doesn’t need to spend billions of $$$ to agnostically integrate cutting edge commercial capabilities with legacy military systems (looking at you CJADC2), you can use this method today for free with humans or for very low cost with a little automation code.
The lesson here is, you don’t need to bring everything inside the wire, and it actually is much more advantageous to just pass the intel instead of the data.
Primes won’t like this concept, as it literally side steps their usual widely overcomplicated and massively expensive lock-in schemas, but it is how a VC could make a compelling cost effective pitch to a government sponsor with limited funding and a need to do more with less today.
Tag the folks below who need a way to do things better, cheaper, faster!
