Andy Lowery of Epirus, chief executive officer, discusses the company’s directed-energy approach to critical point and formation defense, focusing on high-power microwave effects and modular scalable systems such as the HAVOC program. theCUBE Research hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante lead the discussion on counter-UAS, autonomy and rapid fielding, and how these technologies integrate into modern defense architectures.
Lowery attributes Epirus’s approach to delivering low-collateral one-to-many high-power microwave effects that serve as a final-layer electromagnetic CIWS for swarms. They emphasize modularity and autonomous operation to reduce manpower burdens and enable mobile formation defense. theCUBE analysts highlight the need for faster acquisition models and commercial product approaches to keep pace with rapid technology churn in contemporary conflicts. Modern defense architectures increasingly incorporate artificial intelligence. AI-driven autonomy supports rapid decision making and adaptive responses across counter-UAS electronic warfare and formation defense solutions.
Subscribe for more coverage of directed-energy systems, high-power microwave technology, counter-UAS strategies, autonomy and defense acquisition trends.
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Andy Lowery, Epirus
Andy Lowery of Epirus, chief executive officer, discusses the company’s directed-energy approach to critical point and formation defense, focusing on high-power microwave effects and modular scalable systems such as the HAVOC program. theCUBE Research hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante lead the discussion on counter-UAS, autonomy and rapid fielding, and how these technologies integrate into modern defense architectures.
Lowery attributes Epirus’s approach to delivering low-collateral one-to-many high-power microwave effects that serve as a final-layer electromagnetic CIWS for swarms. They emphasize modularity and autonomous operation to reduce manpower burdens and enable mobile formation defense. theCUBE analysts highlight the need for faster acquisition models and commercial product approaches to keep pace with rapid technology churn in contemporary conflicts. Modern defense architectures increasingly incorporate artificial intelligence. AI-driven autonomy supports rapid decision making and adaptive responses across counter-UAS electronic warfare and formation defense solutions.
Subscribe for more coverage of directed-energy systems, high-power microwave technology, counter-UAS strategies, autonomy and defense acquisition trends.
>> Hello, I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here in theCUBE's NYSE studio. Of course, we have our Palo Alto studio connecting Silicon Valley to Wall Street. This is our Defense Tech series, kind of a spinoff, splinter off of our AI and robotics series, which is super popular. But as defense tech takes on a lot of that physical AI and other technologies, seeing it explode into a great vertical of activity, investors, people are building, operating new systems that are going to shape the battlefield. We have Andy Lowery here, CEO of Epirus. Andy, thank you for coming on remotely. We had some folks in person. This will be an ongoing series. Thanks for joining us.
Andy Lowery
>> Thanks for having me. Sorry I couldn't be out there today. I miss New York, time for me to get back out there soon.
John Furrier
>> We'll get you back. I'm sure we'll be having many conversations. You guys are doing some pretty cool things. Lay out what you guys do, because you have some hard news. I want to get into it. But lay out the mission of Epirus and what you guys are doing specifically and what is the application?
Andy Lowery
>> Epirus is a directed energy system company where we provide solutions for what people are starting to call critical point defense and also formation defense or mobile formation defense. So I think to start out before I even get into the deeper tech, there is this sort of macro issue happening where back, 10 or 15 years ago when I worked at Raytheon, we called this asymmetrical warfare, where you've got a lot of consumer electronics or consumer gadgets, if you will, making their way into the room. The problem with that is that, the big army, the big navy, the big groups, as we can talk about in a second, they built air defense around sort of defending against elephants, if you will, like great big elephants, where a lot of the way they defend against elephants is geographically based, upper, upper, and so on. The problem with this new type of threat is that they're like drones. They're evading all of our big systems. They're flying in under the radar, literally flying in under the radar. And so it becomes much, much more difficult to use existing systems with existing primes in order to kind of outmaneuver an entirely different type of warfare. Now, where Epirus comes into effect is basically we've created a mousetrap of sorts. In a way, the way I mean is that when you have a lot of swarms, you hear a lot about drones coming in in multiple quantities. They call that swarms. where you have swarms coming in or you have attack drones coming in, and they're after a particular target, we basically put directed energy or weaponized electromagnetic interference out in the atmosphere so that these new consumer electronics have a much, much more difficult time operating. And so it isn't a one-to-one type of effector, which a lot of pointy-ended missiles are. It's more of a one-to-many where we can create, I'll just say for simple purposes, a force field around a small designated, not a small designated target, but a localized point target as you just cannot fail with. It cannot be hit.
John Furrier
>> It's like a blanket of coverage for security. I was just talking with another expert around the old days of missile construction. You got the mechanics of it. You got the electronics. You got the precision. Now you're getting at, I need to be broad-based, but I don't know what I'm going to hit. There's a lot of drones running around, as you say. So talk about how that works. You just deploy it out there. It's like a cloud of magnetic. Do you have to target it? And what changes in the mechanisms around this? What's the new look?
Andy Lowery
>> Great question. So the system itself resembles a radar transmitter, what they call an electronically scanned array, where you can move a beam around completely electronically. The old radars used to have a gimbal that would spin and could only point the direction of the beam where the actual antenna was facing. New radar systems, modern radar systems, they can move the beam around electronically. And so we've leveraged that same sort of technology, but we've picked and chosen microwave frequencies and microwave energies that are completely different than you would want to use in a traditional radar, in a traditional radar sense. And what it does is it produces an electromagnetic field in the atmosphere. So if you were to measure two points in the atmosphere, you would measure a certain amount of voltage. And that voltage field basically gets coupled directly into the computer boards. It isn't going through an antenna. It's not a jammer. It's actually going straight in through the fabric or the outside plastics of the system that you're after. And then it gets right into the board. It puts voltages on the board. And the computers that run these new weapons that are being deployed en masse just can't handle operation in such a high intensity field. As an example, even a boat motor, like an outboard boat motor, you couldn't run it if we put this beam of energy on top of the boat motor because it has a computer inside dictating the fuel injection and all of that sort of stuff. That computer ends up coupling this voltage onto it and ends up shutting it down. And so the advantage of being able to shut down electronics in this way is that one, it doesn't really matter if it's a fiber-optic drone or an autonomous drone, one that's run on total autonomy. Whether you have 10 drones, five drones, or 100 drones, you can put the energy in sort of a field. And the last is that it's very low collateral, meaning that it's not putting shrapnel and bullets or missiles that have collateral effects out there. So if you look at those three advantages and you look at how the system is working, the military is working hard to kind of quickly deploy this technology along with other new technologies that do really, really well against the new threats of these drones that are evading our older more traditional systems.
John Furrier
>> It's really great engineering work. Congratulations. Really psyched to see that because the collateral damage is essentially just it stops working and maybe falls out of the sky. So it's not a lot of, you said, bullets. And we've all seen our movies. We love watching these movies where it's like the electromagnetic pulse takes out something. When they rob the bank in Vegas, they do that pulse. They take the electricity out of Vegas and they rob the casino. This is kind of like the consumer version. But that's kind of what you're doing. You're saying, hey, I'm going to use the technology to take out threats coming in. And the benefit is you've got a wider swath. So I guess my question is what kind of range are we talking about? Is there, there's microwave, microwave does have long range, but you got to have end to end. What's that mean? Or is it, what's some of the attributes of the microwave?
Andy Lowery
>> Because we're pushing such high energy, you can imagine we're generating electromagnetic interference to such a sort of high degree that it almost would at some point turn on itself and kind of self -destruct. So to push this energy through the atmosphere, which acts like a big resistor as that energy flows through the air, it doesn't have like the same kind of range you'd see on a radar. Because as you pointed out, a radar is a closed loop where you're sending a little pulse out there, it's bouncing back, and you have a very tuned in receiver to kind of amplify that small little energy that comes back. What we're doing is a one -way type of effector where we're pushing this energy out. And so we like to focus the application on critical point defense, which means a stadium or a missile site that then would protect a highly localized geographical area or a radar system or an end of a runway, so to speak, where you have almost this close -in weapon system. So if the viewers are familiar with the Navy's Close-In Weapon System, or the Army has a version called C-RAM, that is sort of the bullet, these big Gatling guns that do about a kilometer, a kilometer and a half. We like to say, if you want to think about it from a range point of view, think about a CIWS, and it's very comparable. The types of ranges, this is like an electromagnetic CIWS. It's your final line of defense. It's your hockey goalie, if you will, at the last bit of the net. When you have leakers that get through more traditional sort of interceptors and other things like that? Or you have swarms, which we just don't have today very good or very many ways of stopping swarms of 50 or 100 systems coming at you at one time. This system is absolutely perfectly well suited for that.
John Furrier
>> Yeah, there's a ton of long tail targets, too. seeing more and more of that. Talk about the news you guys put out this morning. It really does show the direction. You have a contract for high -powered microwave counter-unmanned aerial vehicle capability. This is a program. What's the news? Give us the details. What does it mean? And how does that roll out?
Andy Lowery
>> The customer has been the Army. And lately, we've been starting to get more of a diversified sort of way that the military branches are going after, especially Group 1, Group 2 and even Group 3 drone defense. Meaning specifically, instead of leaning completely into the Army, each of the services are beginning to do their own programs. And so this represents the Marine Corps' desire, because if you take a look at the system, it's very modular, it's very scalable. You can scale it up in size, down in size. You can make it mobile or it can be fixed. So there's a number of ways that you can kind of tweak the core technology for a mission that's appropriate to you. The HAVOC contract, as they call it, HAVOC, is a system that we've been working with ONR, the Office of Naval Research, and other folks in the Marine Corps on implementing as part of their layered defense for some things like expeditionary units or mobile formations, where you might have a Marine Corps kind of spoke-and-hub out there somewhere in the field, maybe has 100 yards or 200 yards of a footprint that it's laid down. And you're looking to give them, quite frankly, a force field. you see on the news all the time in Ukraine, these little group one, group two drones with a grenade on the bottom of it chasing around people. And in some cases, unfortunately, striking an individual and blowing them up. And that's what this new warfare is kind of defined by, you know, is those types of really difficult types of things to stop. We just don't have the weapons We're shooting guns at them and doing all kinds of things. This system will provide a very sophisticated, I'd say, way of putting that final layer, that final protected cover, sort of a miniature Golden Dome, if you will, around, let's say, a Marine Corps unit. Now, the reason why it's called autonomous vehicle is the Marines are looking at almost the version of a loyal companion where they could put a system, a medium sized system on an autonomous vehicle and then run that vehicle along with that Marine Corps formation. so that it could act as a kind of independent bodyguard, a robotic bodyguard that would go around and be controlled either autonomously or controlled by a user, which would be connected via a communication link and then operate the system without having to put a person in a JLTV or use up a Marine. Because people are at a premium, there's not a lot of extra forces for extra systems. And as we're developing new systems out there, one of the things that you may not hear a lot is that the services are having a tough time saying, how do we man these systems? How do we train? How do we operate them? But then again, when we're out in the field, we've got so many different types of defensive systems we already have to man. How do we man these systems? So autonomy is becoming sort of the secret weapon, on trying to include more and more layers and more and more defensive systems.
John Furrier
>> I like the layers. this is exactly the layers conversation. Also, you mentioned asymmetric warfare at the top. This kind of plays into that. Who wouldn't want a blanket of comfort to know that at the tactical edge, they're going to have some support? And again, it's got to be easy to manage. So I see why the Department of Defense needs your technology, and it fills a lot of gaps. Certainly, definitely last line of defense, Golden Dome for whatever layer you're in. But how do you fit into the larger U.S. defense industrial base? Could you share where you go from here?
Andy Lowery
>> Well, on the U.S. side, speaking of Golden Dome, coincidentally, they're looking at taking sort of protect the protector approaches. Right. So you'll have maybe ballistic missile defense against ballistic missiles, defense against nuclear missiles and stuff. We have traditional sort of prime systems that go out and do those jobs. But if you look at the news, if you look at what Ukraine has done to Russia's strategic bombing fleet and such, a lot of times these are sitting ducks. These complex Patriot missile systems, THAAD missile systems, they become sitting ducks. And what's getting them is the drones. They're getting hit by these little group one and group two drones that might be in the weeds, might be 500 meters out, might be a kilometer out, popping up out of nowhere and then coming in and taking out these much more expensive systems. So when you look at one of the approaches that the U.S. military is taking, they're looking at defending sort of these very high value need to protect sites. There's zero tolerance for any failure. We can't allow these sites that we'll set up around the United States to provide us with this big Golden Dome to be attacked, Or let's say in Guam, for example, you can imagine a container ship off the coast of Guam could let loose a whole swarm of different types of small targets that could come in and damage systems that sit at Guam at the very western point of where we have eyes and defensive capabilities. So if you think about this, we become the layered approach on an inside layer, sort of a final layer that would protect the protectors. The protectors would provide the layers at a higher echelon, larger geographical type of a footprint. And we're those critical point defensive layers that protect those protectors.
John Furrier
>> Love the protect the protectors. You got the ROI and that's pretty straightforward. You don't need to sell that case. You've got a lot of CapEx spend on the big guns, so to speak. Got to have protection. What's the process now? Take us through what has to change for the Pentagon to make their business more successful. How do they prepare on their end? Is it a bureaucracy problem? Is it a system design problem? Is it just the strategists and the folks who actually do this for a living can't get the requirements in? Is it too political? What has to change in the Pentagon to make this go forward faster?
Andy Lowery
>> Yeah, well, we see a lot of the changes starting, and it is a bit of sort of get the changes through and implement it. And as people are changing, you tend to take sometimes two steps back before you take three or four steps forward. But what you see happening these days is a much more commercial approach, product approach to expanding the military industrial base. If you look at traditional primes, like ones that I very proudly served for, Raytheon was a big part of my career, they're a services company. They act in conjunction with the military to take requirements, fulfill those requirements, build these big systems, maintain them, train them, very well suited to do that. However, if you fast forward to the drones battle, as we keep referring to it, what you're having is a very, very fast-paced technology churn. So if you look at Ukraine and look at the Middle East, you see basically something work one day, not work the next day, and then an adaptation happen on the third day at this sort of weekly, daily, even maybe at most monthly type of a run rate. So in order to keep up with that, it isn't sufficient to run the old FAR process, the Federal Acquisition Regulation process, tell Raytheon what requirements you need to do what and this sort of thing. What needs to happen is put the gas pedal down and how you see the fastest innovation happening is out of the Silicon Valley product companies that were chasing the next consumer type invention or whatnot. So what you need is a military industrial base that can do both. Department of Defense, what you need is a Department of Defense that can do both. You can do both the old traditional type of military procurement, but then have the new sort of motion that can get after these new product companies that are inventing ahead of the need. We've seen it in SOCOM a little bit. We've seen it in the CIA and other types of three -letter agencies where you have providers build something that they know that they're going to need, bring it to the customer and say, all right, help yourself by buying some of these things. Same thing is happening, but that's happening at a much larger scale than just special operations and some of the other niche military outfits.
John Furrier
>> Andy, that's a great point. even on the cloud side, you see all these new AI factories, NVIDIA's enabling all these, they call them NeoClouds. They're operating at that word you just mentioned, scale. Right? So scale becomes an issue. In those traditional markets and technology, the general system, the global system integrators, they're declining. Their service business is declining and they're starting to have to become engineering companies. The ones that are successful are actually forward deploying their engineering and product teams. They're much faster and more agile. That's what you're saying here, that the primes, if you will, the Raytheons, the big players, the way they did business, a little bit antiquated for the speed and the velocity game of product innovation, electronics, and whatnot.
Andy Lowery
>> It still serves a purpose. I won't say that there isn't still need for Bradley tanks and a need for Patriot missile systems. the big threats are still out there. the big wars could still be in our future. We don't know. But if you look at today, how many injuries and fatalities are happening in Ukraine and where they're all coming from, they're not coming from the traditional warfare artillery. They're coming from drones.
John Furrier
>> Yeah.
Andy Lowery
>> Quite frankly, 80 to 85 percent of all injuries and fatalities in Ukraine are being done by drones.
John Furrier
>> Yeah. These drones, they're death by a thousand paper cuts. it's like just chipping away, low -cost gear, highly targeted, under the radar, so to speak. Just annoyance, but it adds up in the aggregate.
Andy Lowery
>> It absolutely does. It's a death by a thousand cuts. It's a great way of putting it. And that's what's dominating the way warfare is being fought today.
John Furrier
>> Well, conflict has been with mankind since the discovery of land. Now we've got space. So you're going to see more and more conflicts and the safer that can be done managing that conflict, the better. Andy, I really appreciate taking the time coming in, sharing your perspective and give us an update on some of the momentum. Really appreciate it. Final question. Put a plug in for what you guys are working on. Obviously you've got a product roadmap. You're coming out with more stuff, looking to hire. What people are you looking for? What are some of the milestones? Put a plug in for the company.
Andy Lowery
>> Yeah, it's an exciting time to be part of Epirus. What we've done recently is we've been pivoting into a solutions -based company, a company that doesn't only provide a nice force field type of effector, but we have radar, exquisite ability to do AI sensing with electro -optical infrared. We have modeling and simulation that we've been bringing to the customer in order to help with planning out how you set up and how you defend against this new type of warfare. And basically, the field support, I should say, and training and operation of our systems as they're being forward deployed. All of that is needed. It's basically different types of product lines to fulfill the mission. They're heavy duty electronic warfare and look in the not too distant future to see new ways of doing more advanced electronic warfare beyond high-powered microwave coming out of Epirus. But as far as our mission goes, we define ourselves as being critical defense, formation defense, that final layer, leveraging electronic warfare in more and more sophisticated ways of getting at this threat.
John Furrier
>> Andy, thank you so much. Again, layered approach, protect the protector, electronic innovation. Thank you so much for taking the time. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. We are here with our Defense Tech Series. Here at our NYSE studio, part of the NYSE Wired program and community, where technology and capital markets intersect. Defense Tech is using all the deep tech, applying it to the battlefield. Of course, a lot of spillover to the commercial world as well as robotics and AI continue to be part of it. Having the intelligence, the layered approach will make things better. We're doing our part here with theCUBE to share that with you. Thanks for watching.
>> Hello, I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here in theCUBE's NYSE studio. Of course, we have our Palo Alto studio connecting Silicon Valley to Wall Street. This is our Defense Tech series, kind of a spinoff, splinter off of our AI and robotics series, which is super popular. But as defense tech takes on a lot of that physical AI and other technologies, seeing it explode into a great vertical of activity, investors, people are building, operating new systems that are going to shape the battlefield. We have Andy Lowery here, CEO of Epirus. Andy, thank you for coming on remotely. We had some folks in person. This will be an ongoing series. Thanks for joining us.
Andy Lowery
>> Thanks for having me. Sorry I couldn't be out there today. I miss New York, time for me to get back out there soon.
John Furrier
>> We'll get you back. I'm sure we'll be having many conversations. You guys are doing some pretty cool things. Lay out what you guys do, because you have some hard news. I want to get into it. But lay out the mission of Epirus and what you guys are doing specifically and what is the application?
Andy Lowery
>> Epirus is a directed energy system company where we provide solutions for what people are starting to call critical point defense and also formation defense or mobile formation defense. So I think to start out before I even get into the deeper tech, there is this sort of macro issue happening where back, 10 or 15 years ago when I worked at Raytheon, we called this asymmetrical warfare, where you've got a lot of consumer electronics or consumer gadgets, if you will, making their way into the room. The problem with that is that, the big army, the big navy, the big groups, as we can talk about in a second, they built air defense around sort of defending against elephants, if you will, like great big elephants, where a lot of the way they defend against elephants is geographically based, upper, upper, and so on. The problem with this new type of threat is that they're like drones. They're evading all of our big systems. They're flying in under the radar, literally flying in under the radar. And so it becomes much, much more difficult to use existing systems with existing primes in order to kind of outmaneuver an entirely different type of warfare. Now, where Epirus comes into effect is basically we've created a mousetrap of sorts. In a way, the way I mean is that when you have a lot of swarms, you hear a lot about drones coming in in multiple quantities. They call that swarms. where you have swarms coming in or you have attack drones coming in, and they're after a particular target, we basically put directed energy or weaponized electromagnetic interference out in the atmosphere so that these new consumer electronics have a much, much more difficult time operating. And so it isn't a one-to-one type of effector, which a lot of pointy-ended missiles are. It's more of a one-to-many where we can create, I'll just say for simple purposes, a force field around a small designated, not a small designated target, but a localized point target as you just cannot fail with. It cannot be hit.
John Furrier
>> It's like a blanket of coverage for security. I was just talking with another expert around the old days of missile construction. You got the mechanics of it. You got the electronics. You got the precision. Now you're getting at, I need to be broad-based, but I don't know what I'm going to hit. There's a lot of drones running around, as you say. So talk about how that works. You just deploy it out there. It's like a cloud of magnetic. Do you have to target it? And what changes in the mechanisms around this? What's the new look?
Andy Lowery
>> Great question. So the system itself resembles a radar transmitter, what they call an electronically scanned array, where you can move a beam around completely electronically. The old radars used to have a gimbal that would spin and could only point the direction of the beam where the actual antenna was facing. New radar systems, modern radar systems, they can move the beam around electronically. And so we've leveraged that same sort of technology, but we've picked and chosen microwave frequencies and microwave energies that are completely different than you would want to use in a traditional radar, in a traditional radar sense. And what it does is it produces an electromagnetic field in the atmosphere. So if you were to measure two points in the atmosphere, you would measure a certain amount of voltage. And that voltage field basically gets coupled directly into the computer boards. It isn't going through an antenna. It's not a jammer. It's actually going straight in through the fabric or the outside plastics of the system that you're after. And then it gets right into the board. It puts voltages on the board. And the computers that run these new weapons that are being deployed en masse just can't handle operation in such a high intensity field. As an example, even a boat motor, like an outboard boat motor, you couldn't run it if we put this beam of energy on top of the boat motor because it has a computer inside dictating the fuel injection and all of that sort of stuff. That computer ends up coupling this voltage onto it and ends up shutting it down. And so the advantage of being able to shut down electronics in this way is that one, it doesn't really matter if it's a fiber-optic drone or an autonomous drone, one that's run on total autonomy. Whether you have 10 drones, five drones, or 100 drones, you can put the energy in sort of a field. And the last is that it's very low collateral, meaning that it's not putting shrapnel and bullets or missiles that have collateral effects out there. So if you look at those three advantages and you look at how the system is working, the military is working hard to kind of quickly deploy this technology along with other new technologies that do really, really well against the new threats of these drones that are evading our older more traditional systems.
John Furrier
>> It's really great engineering work. Congratulations. Really psyched to see that because the collateral damage is essentially just it stops working and maybe falls out of the sky. So it's not a lot of, you said, bullets. And we've all seen our movies. We love watching these movies where it's like the electromagnetic pulse takes out something. When they rob the bank in Vegas, they do that pulse. They take the electricity out of Vegas and they rob the casino. This is kind of like the consumer version. But that's kind of what you're doing. You're saying, hey, I'm going to use the technology to take out threats coming in. And the benefit is you've got a wider swath. So I guess my question is what kind of range are we talking about? Is there, there's microwave, microwave does have long range, but you got to have end to end. What's that mean? Or is it, what's some of the attributes of the microwave?
Andy Lowery
>> Because we're pushing such high energy, you can imagine we're generating electromagnetic interference to such a sort of high degree that it almost would at some point turn on itself and kind of self -destruct. So to push this energy through the atmosphere, which acts like a big resistor as that energy flows through the air, it doesn't have like the same kind of range you'd see on a radar. Because as you pointed out, a radar is a closed loop where you're sending a little pulse out there, it's bouncing back, and you have a very tuned in receiver to kind of amplify that small little energy that comes back. What we're doing is a one -way type of effector where we're pushing this energy out. And so we like to focus the application on critical point defense, which means a stadium or a missile site that then would protect a highly localized geographical area or a radar system or an end of a runway, so to speak, where you have almost this close -in weapon system. So if the viewers are familiar with the Navy's Close-In Weapon System, or the Army has a version called C-RAM, that is sort of the bullet, these big Gatling guns that do about a kilometer, a kilometer and a half. We like to say, if you want to think about it from a range point of view, think about a CIWS, and it's very comparable. The types of ranges, this is like an electromagnetic CIWS. It's your final line of defense. It's your hockey goalie, if you will, at the last bit of the net. When you have leakers that get through more traditional sort of interceptors and other things like that? Or you have swarms, which we just don't have today very good or very many ways of stopping swarms of 50 or 100 systems coming at you at one time. This system is absolutely perfectly well suited for that.
John Furrier
>> Yeah, there's a ton of long tail targets, too. seeing more and more of that. Talk about the news you guys put out this morning. It really does show the direction. You have a contract for high -powered microwave counter-unmanned aerial vehicle capability. This is a program. What's the news? Give us the details. What does it mean? And how does that roll out?
Andy Lowery
>> The customer has been the Army. And lately, we've been starting to get more of a diversified sort of way that the military branches are going after, especially Group 1, Group 2 and even Group 3 drone defense. Meaning specifically, instead of leaning completely into the Army, each of the services are beginning to do their own programs. And so this represents the Marine Corps' desire, because if you take a look at the system, it's very modular, it's very scalable. You can scale it up in size, down in size. You can make it mobile or it can be fixed. So there's a number of ways that you can kind of tweak the core technology for a mission that's appropriate to you. The HAVOC contract, as they call it, HAVOC, is a system that we've been working with ONR, the Office of Naval Research, and other folks in the Marine Corps on implementing as part of their layered defense for some things like expeditionary units or mobile formations, where you might have a Marine Corps kind of spoke-and-hub out there somewhere in the field, maybe has 100 yards or 200 yards of a footprint that it's laid down. And you're looking to give them, quite frankly, a force field. you see on the news all the time in Ukraine, these little group one, group two drones with a grenade on the bottom of it chasing around people. And in some cases, unfortunately, striking an individual and blowing them up. And that's what this new warfare is kind of defined by, you know, is those types of really difficult types of things to stop. We just don't have the weapons We're shooting guns at them and doing all kinds of things. This system will provide a very sophisticated, I'd say, way of putting that final layer, that final protected cover, sort of a miniature Golden Dome, if you will, around, let's say, a Marine Corps unit. Now, the reason why it's called autonomous vehicle is the Marines are looking at almost the version of a loyal companion where they could put a system, a medium sized system on an autonomous vehicle and then run that vehicle along with that Marine Corps formation. so that it could act as a kind of independent bodyguard, a robotic bodyguard that would go around and be controlled either autonomously or controlled by a user, which would be connected via a communication link and then operate the system without having to put a person in a JLTV or use up a Marine. Because people are at a premium, there's not a lot of extra forces for extra systems. And as we're developing new systems out there, one of the things that you may not hear a lot is that the services are having a tough time saying, how do we man these systems? How do we train? How do we operate them? But then again, when we're out in the field, we've got so many different types of defensive systems we already have to man. How do we man these systems? So autonomy is becoming sort of the secret weapon, on trying to include more and more layers and more and more defensive systems.
John Furrier
>> I like the layers. this is exactly the layers conversation. Also, you mentioned asymmetric warfare at the top. This kind of plays into that. Who wouldn't want a blanket of comfort to know that at the tactical edge, they're going to have some support? And again, it's got to be easy to manage. So I see why the Department of Defense needs your technology, and it fills a lot of gaps. Certainly, definitely last line of defense, Golden Dome for whatever layer you're in. But how do you fit into the larger U.S. defense industrial base? Could you share where you go from here?
Andy Lowery
>> Well, on the U.S. side, speaking of Golden Dome, coincidentally, they're looking at taking sort of protect the protector approaches. Right. So you'll have maybe ballistic missile defense against ballistic missiles, defense against nuclear missiles and stuff. We have traditional sort of prime systems that go out and do those jobs. But if you look at the news, if you look at what Ukraine has done to Russia's strategic bombing fleet and such, a lot of times these are sitting ducks. These complex Patriot missile systems, THAAD missile systems, they become sitting ducks. And what's getting them is the drones. They're getting hit by these little group one and group two drones that might be in the weeds, might be 500 meters out, might be a kilometer out, popping up out of nowhere and then coming in and taking out these much more expensive systems. So when you look at one of the approaches that the U.S. military is taking, they're looking at defending sort of these very high value need to protect sites. There's zero tolerance for any failure. We can't allow these sites that we'll set up around the United States to provide us with this big Golden Dome to be attacked, Or let's say in Guam, for example, you can imagine a container ship off the coast of Guam could let loose a whole swarm of different types of small targets that could come in and damage systems that sit at Guam at the very western point of where we have eyes and defensive capabilities. So if you think about this, we become the layered approach on an inside layer, sort of a final layer that would protect the protectors. The protectors would provide the layers at a higher echelon, larger geographical type of a footprint. And we're those critical point defensive layers that protect those protectors.
John Furrier
>> Love the protect the protectors. You got the ROI and that's pretty straightforward. You don't need to sell that case. You've got a lot of CapEx spend on the big guns, so to speak. Got to have protection. What's the process now? Take us through what has to change for the Pentagon to make their business more successful. How do they prepare on their end? Is it a bureaucracy problem? Is it a system design problem? Is it just the strategists and the folks who actually do this for a living can't get the requirements in? Is it too political? What has to change in the Pentagon to make this go forward faster?
Andy Lowery
>> Yeah, well, we see a lot of the changes starting, and it is a bit of sort of get the changes through and implement it. And as people are changing, you tend to take sometimes two steps back before you take three or four steps forward. But what you see happening these days is a much more commercial approach, product approach to expanding the military industrial base. If you look at traditional primes, like ones that I very proudly served for, Raytheon was a big part of my career, they're a services company. They act in conjunction with the military to take requirements, fulfill those requirements, build these big systems, maintain them, train them, very well suited to do that. However, if you fast forward to the drones battle, as we keep referring to it, what you're having is a very, very fast-paced technology churn. So if you look at Ukraine and look at the Middle East, you see basically something work one day, not work the next day, and then an adaptation happen on the third day at this sort of weekly, daily, even maybe at most monthly type of a run rate. So in order to keep up with that, it isn't sufficient to run the old FAR process, the Federal Acquisition Regulation process, tell Raytheon what requirements you need to do what and this sort of thing. What needs to happen is put the gas pedal down and how you see the fastest innovation happening is out of the Silicon Valley product companies that were chasing the next consumer type invention or whatnot. So what you need is a military industrial base that can do both. Department of Defense, what you need is a Department of Defense that can do both. You can do both the old traditional type of military procurement, but then have the new sort of motion that can get after these new product companies that are inventing ahead of the need. We've seen it in SOCOM a little bit. We've seen it in the CIA and other types of three -letter agencies where you have providers build something that they know that they're going to need, bring it to the customer and say, all right, help yourself by buying some of these things. Same thing is happening, but that's happening at a much larger scale than just special operations and some of the other niche military outfits.
John Furrier
>> Andy, that's a great point. even on the cloud side, you see all these new AI factories, NVIDIA's enabling all these, they call them NeoClouds. They're operating at that word you just mentioned, scale. Right? So scale becomes an issue. In those traditional markets and technology, the general system, the global system integrators, they're declining. Their service business is declining and they're starting to have to become engineering companies. The ones that are successful are actually forward deploying their engineering and product teams. They're much faster and more agile. That's what you're saying here, that the primes, if you will, the Raytheons, the big players, the way they did business, a little bit antiquated for the speed and the velocity game of product innovation, electronics, and whatnot.
Andy Lowery
>> It still serves a purpose. I won't say that there isn't still need for Bradley tanks and a need for Patriot missile systems. the big threats are still out there. the big wars could still be in our future. We don't know. But if you look at today, how many injuries and fatalities are happening in Ukraine and where they're all coming from, they're not coming from the traditional warfare artillery. They're coming from drones.
John Furrier
>> Yeah.
Andy Lowery
>> Quite frankly, 80 to 85 percent of all injuries and fatalities in Ukraine are being done by drones.
John Furrier
>> Yeah. These drones, they're death by a thousand paper cuts. it's like just chipping away, low -cost gear, highly targeted, under the radar, so to speak. Just annoyance, but it adds up in the aggregate.
Andy Lowery
>> It absolutely does. It's a death by a thousand cuts. It's a great way of putting it. And that's what's dominating the way warfare is being fought today.
John Furrier
>> Well, conflict has been with mankind since the discovery of land. Now we've got space. So you're going to see more and more conflicts and the safer that can be done managing that conflict, the better. Andy, I really appreciate taking the time coming in, sharing your perspective and give us an update on some of the momentum. Really appreciate it. Final question. Put a plug in for what you guys are working on. Obviously you've got a product roadmap. You're coming out with more stuff, looking to hire. What people are you looking for? What are some of the milestones? Put a plug in for the company.
Andy Lowery
>> Yeah, it's an exciting time to be part of Epirus. What we've done recently is we've been pivoting into a solutions -based company, a company that doesn't only provide a nice force field type of effector, but we have radar, exquisite ability to do AI sensing with electro -optical infrared. We have modeling and simulation that we've been bringing to the customer in order to help with planning out how you set up and how you defend against this new type of warfare. And basically, the field support, I should say, and training and operation of our systems as they're being forward deployed. All of that is needed. It's basically different types of product lines to fulfill the mission. They're heavy duty electronic warfare and look in the not too distant future to see new ways of doing more advanced electronic warfare beyond high-powered microwave coming out of Epirus. But as far as our mission goes, we define ourselves as being critical defense, formation defense, that final layer, leveraging electronic warfare in more and more sophisticated ways of getting at this threat.
John Furrier
>> Andy, thank you so much. Again, layered approach, protect the protector, electronic innovation. Thank you so much for taking the time. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. We are here with our Defense Tech Series. Here at our NYSE studio, part of the NYSE Wired program and community, where technology and capital markets intersect. Defense Tech is using all the deep tech, applying it to the battlefield. Of course, a lot of spillover to the commercial world as well as robotics and AI continue to be part of it. Having the intelligence, the layered approach will make things better. We're doing our part here with theCUBE to share that with you. Thanks for watching.
