Counter-Drone Defense, Ultrashort Pulse Lasers, Applied Energetics with Chris Donaghey

0:00Welcome to the Startup Defense. My name is Callye Keen. Today I have Chris Donaghey of Applied Energetics. Now, directed energy systems are a pretty hot topic right now. There's a lot of movement in this space, but that doesn't mean that it's a completely new technology. That market is evolving quite a bit, and I'd love to get into a little bit of the technology and the evolution and refinement of that, Chris. But before we talk technical details, same question I ask everybody, what are you passionate about right now? Right now, my passion revolves around getting this technology to market. And I know we're going to get deeper into some of the details about that.

0:40But, you know, a good friend of mine that I worked with at a previous company, KW Corporation, he was kind of a philosophical guy and he liked to define things in terms of wicked problems. And so the way I think about this and our wicked problem is something that we've already seen. We saw it in action when the Ukrainians attacked the Russian military bases last year with small drones attacking highly strategic targets that were not defended against that kind of threat. And frankly, there is no defense for that. And there's also speculation that we recently faced a similar threat in the UK, and that is the reason why we pulled our B-1 bombers out of the UK, because there was speculation that a similar type of attack was going to happen there.

1:26So, you know, I summarize our wicked problem simply by saying it's small, cheap drones in swarms that find their target by sight and cannot be jammed and make decisions autonomously. So if you take jammers off the table and you have a large quantity of them, how do you defeat that problem? So the defense, therefore, has to be faster than those drones can maneuver. It has to be deeper than their ability to sense that you're even there. And the technology also has to be able to evolve as fast as the threat. So we are developing a countermeasure to those small drones. There will be attempts to defeat a counter to that countermeasure.

2:13And so we have to constantly be thinking a couple of steps ahead to be able to overcome whatever countermeasures that the adversary tries to deploy. And so my passion is about bringing a solution to market that can solve that problem. That is the wicked problem of today, for sure. Chris, I was just looking at your background and you have an incredible professional career and you started as an advisor with Applied Energetics. I wanted to, as much as you can get into this, is you were at SAIC and you've been an advisor. I see you work with Silicon Valley Defense Group, but you went from becoming an advisor to then being brought in as now CEO and president.

3:00And you've been at Applied Energetics for quite some time. But can you speak to what that decision looked like going into a startup or revitalizing or refining and growing this company into where it is today? It's a really interesting, interesting background, and I'm constantly fascinated with how people get to where they are right now. Yeah, sure. So, you know, I'll start off, first of all, by saying I kind of consider myself a technology geek. I've been I was an engineering major in college. I've been in the national security world for about 30 years now. My first job coming out of college, I taught nuclear reactor physics at the Naval Nuclear Power School in Orlando, Florida.

3:42I spent six years in the Navy Reserve, where a big portion of that was spent doing scientific and technical analysis of foreign ballistic missile systems. So I played rocket scientist for a few years in there, very part-time considering it was a reserve job, but it was very cool. I spent about seven years on Wall Street as a research analyst focused on small cap, publicly traded defense technology companies. And one of the reasons why I don't do that anymore is almost every company that I covered got bought. And so I was lured away from equity research by a CEO who sold his company to Northrop Grumman and decided that the Northrop culture wasn't for him.

4:22And so he started an intelligence community technology and services company called KeyW. And he asked me if I would come along for the ride at that time. So I spent seven years as the head of M &A, head of corporate capital markets for KeyW, and then transitioned to one of the brand names, SAIC, where I was the head of M &A and Adam Porter Price of Anderle, and I launched the corporate venture investing activity at SAIC as well. Somewhere in there, one of my largest customers when I was an equity research analyst and I, we had been working on this concept of trying to help play an incubator for early stage defense technology companies.

5:05How do we get the VC community, how do we get their portfolio companies more interested in solving national security problems? And that was the genesis of Silicon Valley Defense Group. So we founded unofficially in 2015. we formalized the nonprofit in 2020 when I was at SAIC. At SAIC, we did a handful of decent-sized M &A projects, and ultimately I decided it was time to put my money where my mouth is. And I had had a relationship with Applied Energetics before. They were hitting an inflection point in terms of where the technology was and customer interest. We are already publicly traded. We can talk more about that later if you want to.

5:47So they kind of needed a CFO that understood the public markets as well as the defense technology sector. And the technology is, it's amazing. It's extraordinarily complex what we're trying to do. It's never been done before. Weaponizing an ultra short pulse laser, and that's kind of right in the sweet spot of things that highly interest me. So that's how I got here. Well, you described yourself as a tech geek, tech nerd. You're definitely in the right place for this show. I am. I am. One of the things that I like the most about my job is we work with defense tech startups is effectively getting to be that coalescing point for a lot of really nerdy things that are happening in the industry.

6:36And in In parallel to that, of course, important technology or critical national security problems. You get to work on big, hairy problems. But just that itch of, I want to work on something that is a little bit nerdy. Startup is a great place to be because then you can work on frontier technology, work on problems that other people don't want to do. And I don't know. You get paid to learn. You can't beat that, right? And I learn something new every day here. The science that we're dealing with, you know, again, we'll get more into this, but, you know, the numbers can kind of boggle your mind when you really understand the nature of the solution that we're trying to bring to market.

7:17The numbers are just kind of, they're not intuitive, but we can talk about that, I'm sure, in a little bit. Well, yeah, I would like to get into this a little bit because when you talk about swarm defense, counter UAS, there is a host of solutions now. And traditional thought, hey, I'm going to blast this thing out of the sky. Slightly newer thought, I'm going to dogfight this thing out of the sky. And early, early in this show, I had Nathan Mintz on right after he left Epris. But we're going to, we're going to burn it out of the sky. And despite how many people that we speak to on the show or that we get the chance to integrate with or work with, it is this and, and, and problem.

8:02But really, it comes down to if you're talking about group one, there's something that you can barely see that's moving 75, 95 miles an hour. And there could be hundreds of them. So a lot of the technologies, although perfectly functional for a sliver of the problem, are not really addressable to the problem as described or as stated by the current people that care about it. So, yeah, I'm really interested in where directed energy sits in that solution set. My layman, my outside understanding of this is we need to be able to fire at long distances. we need to fire accurately and often. Correct.

8:48Yep. Yeah, so I would take that even a step further because you're describing the environment as it exists today, but now imagine five years in advance, five years later, when right now the version of the Group 1 drone that is the hardest to defeat is the fiber optic guided drone. You know, it can carry a spool of 10 kilometers of fiber optic cable and launch way, way far away from where it even knows where it's going. But it's not jammable. And so how do you defeat something like that? And now when you fast forward five years and it's not fiber optic cable anymore, it's a brain on the device itself that is an autonomous system that has a library of things that it's looking for to attack.

9:41You know, is it a military vehicle? You know, don't want to hit a school bus, don't want to hit an ambulance. The problem is going to be an order of magnitude higher. And so the number of these systems that have to sense, decide, and act autonomously is going to be an even bigger problem five years from now. And the current state of the art is just not ready for that kind of warfare environment. And that is what we are trying to bring to market. I couldn't agree more. We're also looking at what's happening in Ukraine and judging what future problems would be based on what the current applications are.

10:18And I don't think that that's credible if someone with more resources or more engineering talent wanted to develop new novel systems. Where that line of thinking could go with larger budgets and human capital, I think, is closer to what you're discussing versus fiber drones. I mean, fiber drones, in my opinion, this is like you're patching a problem and then patching the patch to that problem and patching the patch to that problem. Whereas everyone is watching and there'll be completely new novel solutions and new novel problems, of course. One of the main issues that I've seen with laser systems is inherently vision.

10:56Other than the accuracy of detection and then accuracy of shot, your promise is amazing. You're literally promising science fiction. And yes and no. So we have already demonstrated this in an outdoor environment. So we know that the laser is capable of delivering the effect at range in an outdoor environment. And just today, we announced that the latest version of that architecture will extend the range even further. So maybe just to kind of level set here. So, you know, the laser was invented in 1960. The Pentagon's been wanting to field lasers to the battlefield since 1960. And yet up until recently, we have never had a production contract for a laser based weapon system.

11:43You know, everything for the past nearly 50 years has been, or 60 years, 60 plus years, has been a prototype or an experiment. So why is that? We know that the laser can deliver very, very cool effects. And we know that there are threats that are perfectly suited to be encountered by a laser. So it's not that we can't build cool lasers. It's not that we don't have a threat that's vulnerable to them. The real issue has been size, weight, and power. You know, the lasers that we're fielding today, whether they're 30 kilowatts or 100 kilowatts or 300 kilowatts, logistically, they are very complicated devices that take up a lot of space, and they consume a huge amount of power.

12:31And that is the portion of the problem that we are taking head on. So our technology is based on a type of laser called an ultra short pulse laser. So we take a very small amount of laser power and we divide that up into thousands of slices per second. And each one of those slices is compressed to one trillionth of a second. And when you do that, the peak power in that pulse goes into the billions of watts. So this is where I say the numbers of these things are just, they're just not intuitive. So something that's a trillionth of a second, billions of watts, what does that actually mean? What it means is you can target the sensors on board these devices.

13:18So for group one and group two drones in particular, they're really only used for two missions. They're used for their surveillance and the recon mission. So in that case, the sensor, the camera, is the mission for that particular application. The second reason why you use one of these things is generally to hit a mobile or moving target. So in that case, the camera, the sensor, is a critical part of a successful mission there as well. So when you have a pulse that is a trillionth of a second and billions of watts of peak power, When it hits the optic of that camera system, those optics focus that laser light down into a very, very tiny, small spot size.

14:07And this is not a, you're not melting anything. You are literally converting solid state semiconductor material into atoms instantaneously. and when that happens it creates a plasma that is highly conductive and highly energetic and causes the camera to short itself out and we do that in milliseconds. So you don't have the size and logistical burden that you have with a traditional continuous wave laser and you don't have the targeting difficulty of maintaining that spot on a drone that you described something that's flying at 75, 80 miles an hour with a cluttered background 15 feet off the deck.

14:52The effect that we provide happens so quickly, you merely have to basically flash the optic. So you don't have to find the camera. We will give you the ability to create a spot size. And now we do have to rely on sensor technology, in particular acquisition and tracking cameras, to get the light on target. But there are some very good cameras out there. But when you're talking about reducing the size, weight, and power of the system, which also translates to significantly reducing the cost, and when you're talking about a nearly instantaneous kill, your ability to rapidly address threats more quickly naturally comes with that.

15:30And because of the smaller size, weight, power, and cost, you can deploy these in a proliferated network that can all be tied together and used as a picket fence style of protection system that you can't really envision with other types of directed energy systems because you don't have that much available power to be able to do that with other directed energy type systems. Yeah, I love it. Thanks for breaking that down, Chris, because when people think of lasers, they think of something like they would see a K-form. We have a fiber optic laser and a CO2 laser that's cutting metal. So they think of burning a hole and blasting that group one right out of the sky, or in the case of some of the smaller systems, tracking it for one, two, three seconds and burning a hole in it while it's trying to evade and maneuver.

16:21There's a similar problem in EW as well, right? A lot of the handheld systems, you actually have to track the drone. And so there's a lot of pushback from mission owners. Hey, this doesn't actually work. This thing is flying at me. It's 75 miles an hour. I can't track a group one drone flying 75 miles an hour that's 100 meters away. That's a bizarrely difficult problem. And by the way, that drone is bouncing around, right? This is not an inherently stable system. And so, you know, if you find the right focus point, but it jumps by two or three inches, you now have got to refine that point and you've got to restart the melt process.

17:02So, you know, lasers are very, very good for things that fly predictable paths. If it's a ballistic trajectory, you know where it's going to be at time T plus one, two, three, four. But for group one drones, for one-way attack drones that are based on quadcopters, it's a much more difficult problem. We're already seeing discussions of autonomy with jitter or automated evasive flying. So non-linear flying, non-predictive or semi-randomized flight pathing, then it's almost impossible to target it and shoot it through a typical kinetic. You know, you're not going to shoot it with a rifle, a shotgun, any kind of traditional targeting.

17:48That's spot on. I appreciate that. I just wanted everyone that's listening to understand you have something that's quite different from a lot of the other laser systems that are out there. There's in this specific space with counter UAS, there really is an application for everyone. And there's I don't want to take anything away from the giant laser systems that people are making or the 100 percent repurposed fiber laser systems that people are making. But it comes down to swap see for everything. right now. From my perspective, if you can ruck something out or you can put it on a vehicle, you have the type of flexibility that's going to be required in almost any scenario that we're talking about right now.

18:31So it's amazing. That's correct. And to be clear, we readily acknowledge and say, this is a layered ecosystem. There is no silver bullet to this problem. If it's a Shahed, that's not going to be us. Because the Shahed flies with inertial navigation. It's navigating its way typically to a fixed target. It may switch to a visible sensor terminal guidance, but it's going to be too late for us to help there. That thing is already honing in on its target. It's going to detonate. But that's where you would want the 30 kilowatt laser, the 100 kilowatt laser, some of the newer, less expensive missile platforms like Raytheon Coyote or Anduril Roadrunner.

19:19You're going to have to have a different sensing stack for different applications as well. You need the radars that can find these systems and start providing targeting solutions to the individual lasers and effectors to take advantage of that. So we work as part of a team to solve this problem. Our focus just happens to be group one, group two, arriving in large volumes coming from multiple different directions. Particularly to directed energy, you said the technologies existed for quite some time in all kinds of different formats, but Applied Energetics has been a company for a while. The technology or similar technology has been around for a while.

20:03It didn't just come out of the ether out of the vapor yesterday. But it seems, at least from my perspective, like the demand has come out of the ether. The demand is radically changed in the past 12 or 24 months. And how do you reconcile the rapid change in demand for directed energy systems for a company and a technology that's been around for considerably longer? You know, so a lot of it is economics. So we've realized in the engagements that we found ourselves in in the Middle East that using an effector that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to try to defeat a system that the enemy is building for hundreds of dollars is clearly not sustainable.

20:53So you would certainly not want to launch a missile system after a Group 1 drone. But even still, launching$3 million interceptors,$20 million interceptors to go after a Shahed is not an acceptable economic exchange either. So the most viable economic exchange is trading electrical power for those kinetic effects that you get with missile systems. And that is what has put lasers back on the table. And you're right. Our chief scientist built his first very large-scale ultra-short pulse laser in the early and mid-2000s. But the story there would be no different than the 150 or 300 kilowatt laser.

21:41It was a very complex system. It was large. It demonstrated some really cool effects, some of which we can't talk about. But that laser was never going to be fieldable. It was too complex. It took up too much space. You were never going to be able to ruggedize that and put it onto a platform. Fortunately, in our case, there has been a lot of advances made in optical fiber recipes and designs that have allowed us to now take advantage of commercial telecom volume to build a weapon system out of components that never really expected to be used in that kind of environment. And that is really what has changed for us in the existence of this company is migrating the architecture away from something that is fragile and brittle and very, very complex to something that we could build out of commercial telecom equipment.

22:34It's incredible. Chris, what's next for Applied Energetics? What do you see on the horizon? Yeah, it's great. So it's a great question. So when I became CEO in November of 2024, at that time, we were transitioning out of the research lab space. So we had built lasers out of fiber optic components, but they were two-dimensional. It was a bunch of fiber optic cables spread out on the top of an optical table. we are now putting that into hardware. So the goal of 2025 was to build demonstration lasers that would allow us to prove in an outdoor setting that you can deliver ultra short pulse laser light at range and get the expected mission kill of that sensor payload in a relevant environment.

23:262026 is now about building multiple copies of that so getting to a production representative version of the laser that can be repeated over and over and over again so certain so it's been about it's been about architectural evolution we now have portions of this laser that i could hand over to a contract manufacturer and say build me a hundred of these build me a thousand of these things because we now have the recipe for that. So we're at the transition right now where we're building our first production representative prototypes that will have a significantly longer range than the demonstrators that we used earlier this year.

24:05And then 2027 is going to be about the next evolution of that architecture to get us to scaled production. And so that is the next step. It's, you know, now moving from MVP into a product. Fantastic. Well, Chris, I really appreciate you taking the time to be on the show. It's fascinating. I could definitely ask you a lot of, I think, questions that might bore the audience, but really excite me. But thank you so much for what you came on and shared with us today. Yeah, I appreciate the time, Callie. Thanks. Thanks for having me on. My name is Kali Keene, and this has been the Startup Defense.