In 2020, telling people that organized actors were using bots to shape what the public believes got you called a conspiracy theorist. 

The one audience that didn't need convincing was the national security community, which had been thinking about the battle for perception long before it had a commercial market.

Now, the problem has a name — cognitive warfare — and it has changed shape. The target is no longer the information environment. It is cognition itself, and AI has collapsed the cost of attacking it. Blackbird CEO Wasim Khaled returns to All Quiet to walk through what narrative attacks look like now, who is actually getting hit, and why monitoring the problem was never the mission.

What’s happening on the Second Front: 

• Why “misinformation” and fact-checking became the wrong frame, and what narrative intelligence replaced them with
• What AI did to the economics of a narrative attack — from troll farms to autonomous agents, and from “where are the bots?” to “where are the people?”
• Who gets targeted now: members of Congress, CEOs, even shareholder votes — not just the credulous
• Why most platforms stop between observe and orient, and what it takes to close the loop through decide and act
• Prediction that isn’t fortune-telling, it’s reducing the number of futures that can surprise you

Wasim Khaled is co-founder and CEO of Blackbird.AI, whose Constellation platform helped define the narrative intelligence category; a computer scientist by training, he built and scaled an Inc. 500 company before turning to information warfare.

Connect with Wasim

• LinkedIn: Wasim Khaled

Connect with Tyler

• LinkedIn: Tyler Sweatt

Twenty years ago, a young logistics lieutenant solved an impossible field problem with a Franklin Planner, a satellite phone, and a contact who happened to be at his desk. It worked — but it ran on luck. Bill Pessin has spent his career since making sure the mission never has to. He joins Tyler Sweatt to trace the line from Army logistics to leading Salesforce’s Missionforce, and why acceleration, not just speed, is the point.

What's happening on the Second Front:

• How a satellite phone and a Franklin Planner solved an impossible field problem — and why depending on luck is a system failure
• Why Salesforce is the “central nervous system” of the mission enterprise, from HUMINT to workflow
• How Missionforce was born from a single dinner between Marc Benioff and a combatant commander
• What “acceleration” really means when moving faster through the mission is the goal, not the metric
• The one piece of government friction he’d fix first if he had a magic wand

Bill Pessin is SVP of Missionforce at Salesforce and a U.S. Army veteran who has led the company’s national security business since 2014.

• Connect with Bill: https://www.linkedin.com/in/billpessin/
• Connect with Tyler: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tylersweatt

Every veteran gets the same advice on the way out: "your service will speak for itself." It won't. In this episode, Tyler Sweatt sits down with Kyle Eberly, Wyatt Frasier, and Max Cormier, the leadership team behind Sitreps — the recruiting firm that's become the go-to clearinghouse for veteran talent in defense tech and private equity — to give it to transitioning service members straight.

They cover:

• Why civilian employers care about value and dependability, not your combat record — and how to lead with that
• The difference between "signal" and "human capital," and why vets almost always need the former
• Whether an MBA is still worth it (and why "getting an MBA on YouTube" is a trap)
• The negotiation and entitlement mistakes that cost people offers at the one-yard line

Connect with the Sitreps Team:

• Wyatt Frasier, CEO
• Kyle Eberly, Chairman and CTO
• Max Cormier, COO

Connect with Tyler:

• LinkedIn: Tyler Sweatt

A foreign partner's payment has sat in a U.S. government account for nearly a year. The order still hasn't shipped. It's stuck in contracting. That kind of friction is exactly what Church Hutton, Chief Growth Officer at AV, has spent his career navigating: from Senate Armed Services and Appropriations staff, to Army Reserve officer, to leading growth at a company that just doubled in size by acquiring Blue Halo.

Tyler and Church dig into:

• Why "cost per effect" is broken — the U.S. is shooting down $20K threats with million-dollar interceptors
• Why laser weapon systems are finally moving from prototype to production after decades of false starts
• The historical parallel between the Army's interwar cavalry branch and today's Pentagon modernization fights

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Church Hutton has spent over two decades moving between Capitol Hill, uniformed service, and defense industry leadership, most recently steering growth at AV through its transformation into a full-spectrum autonomous systems company.

Connect with Church

• LinkedIn: Church Hutton

Connect with Tyler

• LinkedIn: Tyler Sweatt

Breaking into aviation as a startup means years of quiet, brutal work with nothing to show for it publicly. Zach Shore calls it startups on hard mode: the pain is real, but the moat is massive.

Now Hermeus is the fastest company in history from founding to supersonic flight, and its newly minted CEO sits down with Tyler to explain how a small team out-built a 75-year-old industry.

• "Own the outcome, not the action" — the whole job of leadership at scale
• Why adding sales headcount early creates crosscurrents, not coverage
• 74 days from build stand to weight on wheels, and why building more planes makes you faster
• Keeping your mouth shut as go-to-market strategy in a zero-sum budget world

Zach Shore is the CEO of Hermeus, a former Marine SIGINT officer and Anduril early employee who led the Lattice program before joining Hermeus to build its go-to-market motion from scratch.

Connect with Zach

• LinkedIn: Zach Shore

Connect with Tyler 

• LinkedIn: Tyler Sweatt

Getting AI out of the POC and into production has been the defining challenge of the last three years. Brian Raymond has lived it from the inside — building infrastructure, mistiming bets, and figuring out in real time what "enterprise-ready" actually requires.

This episode covers:

• What it takes to get AI out of the demo and into production at scale
• Why senior engineering judgment matters more than headcount in the AI era
• How Unstructured crossed the Valley of Death without forking their stack — same core code base on Game Warden and in financial services
• What a decade at CIA taught Brian about paranoia as a leadership practice
• Why the dam may have finally broken on enterprise AI adoption

Brian Raymond is CEO and co-founder of unstructured.io, an AI data infrastructure company with $65M raised, 70M open source downloads, and customers spanning financial services, defense, and enterprise SaaS.

Connect with Brian:

• LinkedIn: Brian Raymond

Connect with Tyler:

• LinkedIn: Tyler Sweatt

High-level policy decrees and exciting national security headlines don't win wars. Execution does.

This week, Meagan Metzger (Founder & CEO of Dcode) joins Tyler Sweatt to pull back the curtain on the unsexy, high-stakes reality of defense acquisition reform. While leadership pushes for rapid commercial tech adoption, the "fingers-on-keyboards" workforce is left managing legacy constraints, budget shifts, and an inherent fear of administrative risk.

What’s happening on the second front:

• The critical execution gap between strategic mandates and tactical reality.
• Re-engineering the internal operating models of DoW programs to maximize authorities.
• Why commercial founders must understand the defense ecosystem better than their buyers.
• Transitioning from line-item product procurement to budgeting for mission outcomes.
• Realigning the incentives within federal labs and research communities toward true mission impact.

Connect with Meagan

• LinkedIn: Meagan Metzger

Connect with Tyler

• LinkedIn: Tyler Sweatt

At some point, every founder runs into reality.

Not just the pitch or the vision. But the part where it breaks, gets hard, and no one is coming to fix it for you.

This is where most companies are decided.

Paige Craig (Managing Founder & Partner at Outlander VC) joins guest host Sam Gray to break down how he evaluates founders in defense tech: how conviction is earned, what stands out early, and what separates the teams worth betting on.

What’s happening on the Second Front:

• What earns a first check (and what doesn’t)
• Insight, obsession, and character—and why they matter more than experience
• How strong teams handle setbacks vs. hide from them
• The reality of founder dynamics as companies grow
• Where defense tech is going—and who’s going to build it?

Connect with Paige

• LinkedIn: Paige Craig

Connect with Sam

• LinkedIn: Sam Gray 

Cyber isn’t just a compliance problem anymore.

It’s operational. It’s persistent. And it’s moving faster than the systems built to manage it.

Katherine Sutton (Assistant Secretary of War for Cyber Policy and the Principal Cyber Advisor to the Secretary of War) joins Tyler Sweatt to talk about keeping pace across policy, technology, training, experimentation, and most importantly - the people.

What’s happening on the Second Front: 

• Why cyber can’t be treated as a compliance exercise anymore
• The real bottleneck to adopting new technology (and it’s not the tech)
• How to get capability into operators’ hands faster
• Rethinking talent, training, and career paths in the cyber force
• Why incremental change won’t keep up—and what transformation actually requires

Connect with Katherine Sutton

• LinkedIn: Katherine Sutton

Connect with Tyler

• LinkedIn: Tyler Sweatt

John Price, Founder and CEO of Highground, has worked across special operations, the Senate, and private markets. Now, he’s focused on helping investors and builders understand what the government actually wants and how it buys.

He joins Tyler Sweatt to break down how demand shows up, where teams misread it, and how to identify where real programs—and real money—actually sit.

What’s happening on the Second Front

• How government demand actually shows up, and why it’s often misread
• What separates real opportunities from noise in defense markets
• How investors and operators evaluate where to place bets
• Where founders lose time (and how to move earlier in the process)
• Making the system more predictable instead of relying on luck 

Connect with John

• LinkedIn: John Price

Connect with Tyler

• LinkedIn: Tyler Sweatt

Today, Armada is opening its first Galleon Experience Center in Washington, DC.

A live environment showcasing what it actually takes to run AI at the edge—bringing together ruggedized infrastructure, cloud, and secure software deployment. With 2F Frontier as part of the stack, extending DevSecOps to disconnected, real-world environments.

And with Offset 2026 right around the corner, it felt like the right time to revisit a timely conversation from last year.

On the Offset stage, Tyler Sweatt, Pradeep Nair (Armada), Leigh Madden (Microsoft), and Korie Seville (DISA) got into:

• The gap between data and decision at the edge
• What breaks between connectivity, compute, and deployment
• Why speed to mission still comes down to authorization 

And if you want to be part of where this is going next, register for Offset 2026.

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From oil platforms to special‑ops posts, cloud infrastructures are now being deployed in environments they weren’t initially designed for. This panel explores how customized edge architectures and commercial integrations orchestrate distributed services and securely manage intermittent connectivity. All while addressing ongoing challenges in latency, interoperability, and standardization to deliver resilient, mission‑critical private clouds.

Connect with the speakers:

• Tyler Sweatt
• Pradeep Nair
• Leigh Madden
• Korie Seville

Are we even having an honest conversation about AI?

Right now the public discourse seems to bounce between two extremes: AI will save the world and AI will destroy the world.

Neither is particularly helpful.

The more interesting questions are things like: Why is there so much distrust of AI? How should governments actually think about adoption? And how can technology shorten the distance between knowledge and decision-making?

In this episode of All Quiet on the Second Front, Tyler Sweatt sits down with Igor Jablokov, Chairman & Founder of Pyron to unpack the conversation we should probably be having about AI, trust, and the future of technology.

Connect with Igor

• LinkedIn: Igor Jablokov

Connect with Tyler

• LinkedIn: Tyler Sweatt

Winning a contract isn’t the same as deploying capability.

This week, Andrew Vanderhoof (Director of DAF CLOUDworks at AFRL) joins Tyler to talk about what actually happens between “award” and “operational.”

They cover:

• Getting commercial software into classified environments
• Why OTAs and zero-dollar agreements matter
• The real weight carried by DAOs and AOs
• Scaling innovation without breaking trust
• And why the timeline is now weeks to months — not years

If you care about commercial-first actually meaning something, this one’s for you.

Connect with Andrew

• LinkedIn: Andrew Vanderhoof

Connect with Tyler

• LinkedIn: Tyler Sweatt

Government contracting moves $750B+ a year.

But the system still runs on PDFs, spreadsheets, and human bottlenecks.

This week, Derek Hoyt — CEO & Co-Founder of GovSignals — joins Tyler to talk about what happens when you aim AI directly at procurement.

They dig into:

• Why contracting shops are gutted but the dollars keep growing
• The hidden cost of B&P burn inside defense companies
• Why most new defense startups underestimate procurement
• How shrinking a 30-day cycle to a week changes everything
• And what it would take to move from risk-averse to risk-on

Connect with Derek

• LinkedIn: Derek Hoyt

Connect with Tyler

• LinkedIn: Tyler Sweatt

If we want to win the next fight, we have to outlearn first.

This week, Tyler sits down with Sir Tom Copinger-Symes, former Deputy Commander of UK's Cyber & Specialist Command (CSOC), to talk about the hard shift from infantry officer to cyber leader — and what that journey reveals about where defense is behind.

What’s happening on the second front:

• Industrial-age systems in an information-age world
• Why cyber and electronic warfare are decisive
• Why recruitment is a flow problem, not a patriotism problem
• The cognitive battlefield shaping outcomes every day
• And what dialing up risk really means

No backbone → no speed.

No speed → no advantage.

Connect with Sir Tom Copinger-Symes

• LinkedIn: Sir Tom Copinger-Symes

Connect with Tyler

• LinkedIn: Tyler Sweatt

This week on All Quiet on the Second Front, Tyler sits down with Brian MacCarthy to talk about why defense innovation keeps getting stuck between good ideas and real delivery. They dig into why the ecosystem keeps confusing motion with progress, and what it takes to get past pilots and into production.

What’s Happening on the Second Front:

• Why capital without execution doesn’t move the mission
• The real friction slowing commercial tech adoption in government
• Culture change as the hardest (and most necessary) battleground
• Why “prime vs. neoprime” misses the point
• What it actually takes to move from pilots to scaled impact

Connect with Brian

• LinkedIn: Brian MacCarthy

Connect with Tyler

• LinkedIn: Tyler Sweatt

Leaving the uniform doesn’t mean leaving your identity behind.

In this episode of All Quiet on the Second Front, Tyler Sweatt sits down with Bill Wall — former Green Beret, JSOC veteran, and CEO of Accrete AI Government — to talk about transition, purpose, and why the skills forged in special operations translate far beyond the battlefield.

What's happening on the Second Front:

• How military frameworks like F3EA translate directly to business growth
• Why identity loss — not skills — is the hardest part of leaving the uniform
• What it really takes to drive innovation inside institutions that resist change
• How AI is maturing inside government, and where it actually delivers value
• The role of risk tolerance and financial resilience in post-military success
• Why meaningful progress rarely comes from easy or comfortable answers

In this episode of All Quiet on the Second Front, Tyler sits down with former US Congressman Brad Carson to examine one perspective in the evolving debate around AI governance, public trust, and national security.

Brad brings decades of experience across government, academia, and policy, having served two terms in the U.S. House of Representatives and in senior Department of Defense leadership roles. He is now President of Americans for Responsible Innovation, where he focuses on AI policy and public trust.

The conversation explores frontier AI risks, innovation versus regulation, and the tradeoffs policymakers face as public skepticism around AI continues to grow.

What’s happening on the Second Front:

• AI governance and competing views on guardrails
• Frontier AI risks and national security implications
• Public trust, skepticism, and potential backlash
• Innovation, regulation, and policy tradeoffs
• Workforce impacts and public perception of AI

Connect with Brad

• LinkedIn: Brad Carson

Connect with Tyler Sweatt

• LinkedIn: Tyler Sweatt

On this episode of All Quiet on the Second Front, Tyler Sweatt sits down with Meghan Moretti, CEO of the Johnny Mac Soldiers Fund, to talk about service beyond the uniform and what it takes to sustain impact long after the fight fades from the headlines.

A West Point classmate and former Army MP, Meghan shares her path from the military to healthcare to leading one of the most impactful military family nonprofits in the country. The conversation explores leadership transitions, generational responsibility, and why community, not just capital, is essential to honoring service and sacrifice.

What’s Happening on the Second Front

• Why nonprofit leadership is faster and harder than most people expect
• The scale of need facing military families as the next generation reaches college age
• How community and storytelling cut through generational numbness
• What meaningful service looks like after the uniform comes off

In this episode of All Quiet on the Second Front, Tyler Sweatt is joined by Fred Thomas, UK Member of Parliament for Plymouth Moor View, Royal Marines Reservist, and member of the House of Commons Defence Committee.

Fred brings a perspective shaped by time in uniform and now inside Parliament, where he focuses on modernizing defense capability and accelerating the adoption of new technology. Together, they examine how allied defense ecosystems can move faster without sacrificing sovereignty, why procurement and information-sharing remain persistent friction points, and where NATO and partner nations have real opportunity to collaborate more effectively.

The conversation spans the UK, US, and broader NATO landscape at a moment when security, technology, and public trust are increasingly intertwined.

What's happening on the Second Front:

• Why defense innovation continues to lag behind the threat
• The tension between sovereignty and interoperability across allied nations
• NATO’s underutilized role in collaborative procurement
• Where emerging technologies could unlock advantage in the next 3–5 years
• The role of public service and cohesion in long-term security

Connect with Fred Thomas

Connect with Tyler Sweatt