The Missing Power Layer of Modern Warfare

0:00All the things we want to do is really about the soldier. In the mud, cold, wet, tired, hungry, what makes their lives easier or better? Your average soldier today, they're drawing just by themselves 30 to 60 watts of power continuously during their operations. So that's basically a mid-tier laptop running all the time. We are moving towards an increasingly electronic battlefield. There's really this missing power layer that is required to actually field all those systems. Chariot is building the tactical power layer for robotic warfare. So we had a lot of passive capabilities that were able to hide, kind of sense without kind of giving away position, but needed the ability to go active when we needed to make an interception.

0:36So that meant that we had to bring the 15 kilowatt generator that was 99 % of the time running at 500 watts, creating this detectable signature, both from the thermal and acoustic signature and then the resupply because it's using fuel so inefficiently. So there are all these things that create a signature in environments where there shouldn't be signatures, and that means that we can be targeted. So someone will go plug in a copy pod, and it'll take down the air defense radar. Modern warfare runs on electrons. Drones, sensors, electronic warfare systems, edge AI. Every capability the Army wants to field draws power.

1:11But the infrastructure delivering that power hasn't kept pace. For decades of counterinsurgency, diesel generators and fixed forward operating bases were enough. Today, the battlefield is distributed, decentralized, and contested. Every generator running at 1 % capacity is a targetable thermal signature. Every fuel convoy supplying it is a liability. The question isn't how to power more things. It's what the right things are and how to make that power invisible to the enemy. Aaron Price-Wright speaks with Adam Wormuth, founder and CEO of Chariot Defense. and Alex Miller, CTO of the U.S. Army. We're here today with Adam Wormuth and Alex Miller.

1:58Adam is the founder and CEO of Chariot Defense, which builds next-generation power systems for the battlefield. Before that, he led engineering at Anduril and product at Archer Aviation. And Alex is the CTO of the U.S. Army, where he runs all things technology. He's the driving force behind the Army's push, thank you, to get new tech into soldiers' hands fast. Adam, Alex, welcome to the A16C Show. Yeah, thanks for having me. Take care. Maybe just getting right into it. Adam, for listeners, in 60 seconds, what is Chariot building? Who's the end user? And what does winning look like for you guys in the field?

2:31It's a great question. Chariot is building the tactical power layer for robotic warfare. The reason why Chariot needs to exist in the world is we are moving towards an increasingly electronic battlefield at the same time that is becoming more distributed, more decentralized. and we're building kind of these new systems or pushing these new systems down to these operational mobile forces that now need to sustain equipment, have organic capabilities around command and control, around County UAS, around air defense, EW, all of these electronic systems. And there's really this missing power layer that is required to actually field all those systems.

3:05So when I was leading County UAS at Anderle, we were fielding all of these new systems into expeditionary environments and constantly running into problems with the existing power solutions, being insufficient for what they're being asked to do in that new environment. So what we're doing is basically building integrated battery, power electronics, microcontroller systems that allow you to hybridize your systems. So we're not going to replace diesel fuel. We're not going to replace power generation. What we can do is be much more smart and be much more tactical about how we actually employ and distribute power.

3:34Awesome. And now, Alex, for listeners, what does the CTO of the Army actually mean in practice? What do you control versus influence? and what are you trying to change right now? No, it's a good question. It's all an influence operation. So I will tell you the real driving force between all the change, really as Secretary Driscoll, General George as the Chief of Staff of the Army, and then I have an amazing partner in Mr. Brent Ingraham as the Army Acquisition Executive. So right now at this point in time, influence is really easy because I have willing partners and willing leadership who say, we are going to change things for the better.

4:10But what it means for me in practice, What I do control is getting out and actually seeing the problem set with my own eyes, digging in with my hands, actually being there, seeing it, doing it, which you don't see a lot of. Generally, the Pentagon becomes very insular and people just sort of hang out there and drive things from the top. It becomes much easier when you really understand from the bottom, from soldiers in the mud, cold, wet, tired, hungry, what makes their lives easier or better. That is my job to go understand the problem space rather than just approaching bright, shiny objects or chasing technology.

4:43That's awesome. So maybe let's set the scene. The Army is adding drones, sensors, electronic warfare, edge AI, autonomous systems. We've heard about this. It's happening faster than ever. And we're here because there are gaps in our power infrastructure. So maybe, Adam, let's start with you. Paint us the picture of a tactical operations center right now. What's physically there? What's running? What's consuming power? what are the gaps? Yeah, it's a great question. So the tactical operation center today looks a lot different than it looked five years ago. As we transition from a very counterinsurgency focused force structure to a very large scale combat operations distributed decentralized.

5:21And so you're seeing brigade command posts and great operational centers that are smaller than a battalion command post was before. And so what you're doing is you're pushing a lot of capabilities that used to be able to live at these big fixed site fobs, right? So those forward operating bases that were dug in or in construction. Like semi-permanent. That's right. And so things like mobility didn't matter. Things like signature management didn't matter. Even logistics mattered and logistics was painful, but we kind of lived with those logistical burdens. And the reason was we were fighting on kind of this barbell of the operational spectrum where there was kind of short patrols happening from where all the soldiers really needed to carry with them was a radio to communicate back to that brigade command post that was kind of dug in and fixed and could provide air defense, ISR, C2 capabilities as long as they could communicate with that forward force.

6:05What we're seeing is that every kind of link in that chain has been disrupted. So if you think about a platoon, forward deployed, needs to go see over that next mountain to know what's on the other side of that terrain feature, they would call back for support to this big fixed command post. That command post would launch a drone, you know, a fixed-wing drone from a runway that would get overhead and kind of provide time on station and stream down a high-bandwidth 30 FPS full-motion video stream down to that platoon, and they would have that intelligence picture. Every link in that chain has been disrupted in a large-scale combat operation fight.

6:35That transmission back to base is going to get that triangulated and detected and targeted. The runway that they'd be launching that from has been destroyed by the enemy's long-range strike capabilities. If you do manage to get ISR overhead, that's going to be contested. That's going to be shot down. And if it does manage to maintain time on station, that video link down to it is being jacked. And so what that means is we're pushing a lot of those capabilities down to the company, the platoon level. And so your command post is now much more distributed. You're running command and control out of a single truck rather than these big kind of semi-permanent installations.

7:07So we're starting to see this shift already, but let's take that same talk and add everything that the Army wants to do in the next, let's say, two to three years. Next generation command and control, AI, more autonomous systems. How does that power math change? Sure. So before we actually talk about the tactical operations center, let's actually talk about the soldier. So all the things we want to do is really about the soldier. Your average soldier today might have one or two radios, depending on if they're in a leadership position. As we think through things like Soldier Board Mission Command, as we think through drone batteries, as we think through their EUD, their in-user device, or something like a tactical Android assault kit, they're drawing just by themselves 30 to 60 watts of power continuously during their operation.

7:52So that's basically a mid-tier laptop running all the time. So if you run that over a 72-hour operation, they might be drawing between 1.5 and 2 kilowatt hours just by themselves before you start adding their team, their squad, their platoon. So before we start talking about the fixed positions and the mobile positions, power looks different at the soldier level. Now for things like next gen command and control, one of our goals is really making those platforms much more power efficient, but also bringing down the size of those command posts. So we had this wonderful set of experimentation called Transforming in Contact where the very first unit that went through that, the 2nd Brigade 101st strike, their brigade command post was five Humvees backed up to each other.

8:37Whereas normally a brigade's talk by doctrine is 4 ,000 square feet. So if you think through just making it smaller forces us to have less servers, less computers, less fans, less TVs because you walk into every jock and it looks like a Taj Mahal of TVs and routers and everything. Just by minimizing the footprint, we've reduced how much stuff we have, which means we've reduced our power draw. So as we then take that truth and look at Nixian Command and Control, which is our full stack deployment of how do you do infrastructure for communications, infrastructure for software platforms, infrastructure for software services like autonomous warfare like robotic warfare and then the delivery so everything from your apps or your tech tools or the websites that you hit being able to deliver that as one set of platforms as a full stack rather than the 17 disparate systems that came before it means less servers less radios less routers less cabling less comms antenna less noise policymakers.

9:43That is what we're going forward to. It's not just trying to find better ways to power everything we had. It's actually thinking through what should we have and then how do we power that? So, I mean, you've seen some of this in the field, Adam and Andrel. You were at Andrel for three and a half years building counter drone systems. What did the power problem for these actually look like in practice for you? What was failing in your experience? Yeah. So that experience really shaped what Chariot Defense is today, which was we were supporting expeditionary county U.S. operations, you know, before Ukraine, before it was kind of the kind of in vogue topic.

10:19And it's because we were working with SOCOM, who was kind of running into these problems, you know, ahead of the conventional force. You know, when we started fueling those systems, I assumed, cool, hey, we bring the robots, right? And there'll be somewhere for us to plug in. Yeah. And quickly realized that that was not the case and that your options today were kind of small or like lead acid, you know, batteries, not really designed for energy storage and power distribution or kind of massive diesel generators. And we certainly kind of believe in diesel being part of this solution. We're very much a hybrid power company.

10:50It's very energy dense compared to batteries. But what not having a kind of hybrid system forced us to do was size our power generation to the peak demand of that sense of that kind of US kit. So we had a lot of passive capabilities that were able to hide and sense without kind of giving away position, but needed the ability to go active when we needed to make an interception. So that meant that we had to bring the 15 kilowatt generator that was 99 % of the time running at 500 watts, which means it's using fuel very inefficiently. It's causing reliability challenges. It's taking up a lot of space on that aircraft that's aerosalting in.

11:24It's, you know, creating a detectable signature, both from the thermal and acoustic signature and then the resupply because it's using fuel so inefficiently. So all of that creates a targetable signature that's throwing away a lot of those benefits of that passive counter-gas system. So that's really where we believe in hybrid. We believe in batteries as power, power management, power distribution, kind of pairing with the existing power generation assets in the Army around the vehicles and the power generation that exists. Would love, you know, on this topic of kind of the generators and the diesel systems that are in use today, you know, they produce heat, noise, emissions, they can be detected and targeted.

11:57You know, we were also just talking earlier about how much of a target these fuel convoys are. We'd love to hear kind of your perspective, How big of a problem is it for the Army? That's a good question. So there was a long period of time where being an 88 Mike, a truck driver, was one of the most dangerous jobs because you're basically driving, you're driving a truck full of liquid explosive. You're driving a truck full of fuel. So it didn't matter how efficient the generators got, they still needed fuel to run. And all of the signature that we're thinking about for even in the world we're seeing today, over the weekend and into today, signature really matters.

12:32So if you are creating a thermal signature because your generator is running all the time, you can be found. And so maybe for the very tech illiterate, of which there are probably not many listening to this podcast, thermal signature is basically heat. It's heat. So if your phone gets hot when you're using it too much, and that's a thermal signature, if you put your, the easiest way, if you go put your hand on top of your refrigerator at home, it's warm because it's actually generating, it's using energy, it's generating that, and it's putting out thermal energy. And that means that the enemy could potentially detect.

13:04And you can see it. Yeah. You can see it because it's part of the spectrum. That's why hunters use thermal cameras. Everything generates that. Same with acoustics. So it makes noise because you can hear it for a long distance, especially when you're in flat terrain or nothing else should be making noise. Batteries, if they are not coded correctly, if the converters aren't shielded, they actually produce electromagnetic noise. So you can find that as well. So there are all these things that create a signature in environments where there shouldn't be signatures, and that means that we can be targeted.

13:34That's one of the areas that we are really thankful for, new players that are emerging in the portfolio that say, I know that I have to generate power. We don't live in a world where we own everything all the time, therefore it has to actually produce power in a way that's useful. And useful in this context is low thermal output, low acoustic output. So can't be hot, can't be loud, and it's got to be easy to actually move. Yeah, the easy to move, I think, is also underrated as a challenge. So maybe, Adam, back to you, what exactly is your first product? How does it work? How's it different from a traditional battery system?

14:17Yeah, and we actually tend to lead our products with their concepts of employment because that's really what makes our product interesting. And so what our first product is, is the same 424 system. It's a four kilowatt system, four kilowatt hours of energy storage. But what it does is it can deploy at kind of the squad up to battalion level. Maybe for just contextualize, how much is that? Like, what does that power? Yeah, so it depends on the use case. And that's kind of the great thing about having this universal product is, so we went out to our first transformation and contact exercise back in May of last year.

14:48That was six months from first check into the company. So kudos to the Army Transformation Initiative in terms of its ability to bring new companies in to say, hey, we're going to work with this. Um, we're going to bring it in, right? We're not going to make you file six months worth of paperwork. We're not going to say, hey, we already started planning this exercise six months ago. Try again next year. Um, and so we, we, we brought it out there and a lot of it was, hey, let's discover those use cases on the ground. We had a multifunctional reconnaissance company, which is one of the new elements in the mobile brigade combat teams, uh, actually air assault in with our, with that M424 system.

15:18They're able to run 36 hours without generating any kind of detectable thermal or acoustic signature, running their radios, their EW equipment, their drones. At a battalion command post, you're looking more at like two or three hours. And this is where we say, hey, the battery is not really the answer from an energy perspective. In some cases, it can be from a little enough time. But at a battalion command post, what we saw was guys idling trucks under camo nets, giving them carbon dioxide poisoning because they had no way to convert their AC generator power to DC power. Or we saw the executive officer having to choose who got to plug their laptops in so they wouldn't overload those generation assets.

15:52And so what our system does is it kind of drops in the middle and kind of acts as this converter, buffer, manager. A buffer zone. Exactly. That lets you handle the big surges on the output side without passing those through to your loads. Let's you shut your generation off to go into that low signature kind of hiding mode. Gives you, you know, failover when those power generation assets fail. Gives you high quality power to your C2 equipment. And a lot of that NGC2 equipment requires - What do you mean when you say high quality power? Yeah, so it is a bit of a nuance like a tech - It's like electrons, you know?

16:23Yeah. when you plug into traditional generators and you have a big surge of load a lot of times that can pass that can impact the generator's ability to generate your kind of clean sine wave alternating current power when you're plugging into maybe host nation shore power, right? There's brownouts, blackouts voltage spikes all of that is kind of kryptonite to these command and control systems Yeah, I mean, I'm being somewhat facetious but like, you know, a lot of It's a real thing And a lot of people who work in tech and who listen to this podcast sit in Silicon Valley in the United States where maybe they have a power outage every once in a while but really don't have to reckon with what it means to not have kind of reliable, consistent power to their laptops.

17:10And it's one of those things where if you've traveled overseas and you plug your phone into a wall after you've figured out which adapter and it doesn't charge quite right, you can tell that it's taken too long or it's getting really hot. Or if you're me and you blow out your hair dryer. Yeah. So like clean power is something that we used to talk about a lot more. And then we figured out how to put generators in the middle and separate ourselves. But those were fuel driven. So having clean, consistent power, that's a really important topic. Yeah. And you brought up the wrong voltage, wrong frequency, right?

17:40You know, stuff that's frying your hair dryer, right? So a big part of how we're going to fight and how we're fighting now is with allies that don't always share the same power standards. So the other thing our system can do is act as that software-defined power layer to bring all of these different sources together and power all these different outputs. Right now, there's really no smarts running on kind of, there's no like kind of routing happening with power. So someone will go plug in a coffee pot and it'll take down the air defense radar. And so what we're doing is applying kind of that smart power layer that's able to kind of manage, that's able to optimize, that's able to forecast and simulate, that's able to convert to the right voltage, the right frequency, kind of through hot software handshakes between systems.

18:20And so I think, yeah, people don't realize kind of how much room there is to improve kind of the current power situation, how much in counterinsurgency we kind of just got away with some kind of bad habits around this stuff and how much we're really gonna have to transform to kind of meet this new modern type of way of fighting. But it's, I'm glad you brought up the coffee maker. So this is sort of tangent. It's also an education on things that are very high draw versus things that are very low draw. Because a lot of people don't understand as soon as you plug your coffee maker in or a microwave, you are changing the nature of how much power you're drawing because it is going to spike immediately versus a lot of our drone batteries are much, much lower draw, but they're longer.

18:57So you need that energy. It's just not spiking and bringing down your talk, which definitely didn't do a coffee maker. Yeah. It's like I have in our pantry, we have a microwave and a toaster oven. Can't run both of them at the same time. I remember that the hard way approximately once a week. And then the software layer that we're adding is instead of expecting our, you know, our, you know, end user level, you know, operators to really be like, you know, PhDs in power. Instead of that, if you just add that software layer that can say like, hey, instead of turning on all three air conditioners at the same time, turn one on, wait three seconds, turn the other on, wait three seconds, turn the other on, wait three seconds.

19:35Very simple, zero operational impact. You've now cut your peak power demand by a factor of three, which means you've cut the size and weight of your system by a factor of three. So some very small, you know, improvements with software can have a major impact on mission outcomes. And so, Adam, Chariot's core insight is that the commercial EV and eVTOL industries have largely already solved this or solved this to some extent. Can you explain that in more detail? What made you connect the dots between the tech on the commercial side and the military application? Yeah, absolutely. So the time I spent in my kind of first career when I come out of college, outside of my time at Andrel, was in the electric aircraft industry.

20:14Electric aircraft industry is only possible because of some incredible breakthroughs happening in the technology sector for these core kind of electro-industrial stack components around high-voltage batteries, silicon carbide power electronics. It's this like almost magical new technology that lets you do all of these things in terms of kind of software-controlled power, really high compact, high density. And so there's some incredible breakthroughs there. Same breakthroughs that are behind, you know, Heron Power, right? Same breakthroughs that are behind companies like Impulse Stoves even is these really high-powered-density electronics.

20:45And so that was all happening really in the commercial sector, right? Tesla kind of leading the way there. Two of our leading electric aircraft companies, you know, are in the Bay Area about 20 miles from Tesla headquarters, right? You know, Joby and Archer, not in LA where you might expect them to be. And it's because these incredible breakthroughs happening in the commercial sector that actually allow your hybrid system to win on kind of size and cost and weight compared to a traditional combustion engine system. And so that improvement's been kind of happening over the past 30 years in the industrial sector.

21:14And what we're doing is kind of through good forward deployed engineering and good, you know, kind of go to market and building the product in a way that's informed by our experience getting into the butt and dirt with the warfighter. We can kind of take that amazing technology advancements and bring it into the department in a way that's similar to what Andrel did with self-driving car technology and autonomy developed from that industry to what Palantir did in terms of their working with kind of cloud compute and big data processing. Technology invented commercially, brought to department. There's been kind of a flip from what we saw in the Cold War, right?

21:43Which was GPS, internet really invented and kind of research labs brought into the commercial sector. We've seen a bit of a flip there and we're kind of part of that chain. Coming full circle. And I mean, you mentioned this earlier, but you went from founding the company to having a system in the field in six months. How did you achieve that? How would have, and how maybe would that have looked differently under the old model before we had people like Alex pushing things forward? Yeah, I mean, I talked about a little bit of just like, you know, the paper drills, right? And kind of the process following and the kind of inflexibility to say, why does this process exist, right?

22:26And I think we kind of lost track of that where the process kind of became the outcome versus, you know, the outcome is winning. Like we want to win. And then like, okay, the process exists and we have things around like fairness and we have things around, you know, the kind of right regulations and stuff so that everyone kind of feels like they have enough of a shot to keep new entrants participating. But there was kind of then this overcorrection where the process became the outcome. And I think what you've seen with the guidance from Secretary Hegseth and Secretary Driscoll and General George is really refocusing on the outcome.

22:59And what that means if you focus on the outcome is, hey, just because this company didn't exist when we started planning this exercise, literally for that JRTC exercise, we did not exist when that planning kicked off. And it's kind of been a complete transformation in terms of the willingness to accept risk, the willingness to kind of bring in new entrants, right? And just I think that really that outcome focus is really what I would say is the kind of central tenet of the transformation initiative. Yeah, I agree. And this is really the core tenet of when Secretary Hegseth and Secretary Duffy and Secretary Michael for acquisition and sustainment, research engineering, and of course the department, that's really what they're talking about in terms of, it's a cliche, overused, it's buying runs.

23:41It's not, hey, our goal is to field a team. No, our goal is to actually win. And then you field a team that's going to win and you work backwards. So the transforming and contact when we first started, it was all about how do we flood the zone for those units, give them all of the technology to solve their problems. And then we will find out what doesn't work. We'll find out what worked, but needs maybe some adjustment rather than the two years of writing requirement, the five to seven years of trying to field something and then going, ooh, I don't think we bought and made the right thing. After all.