We help aerospace clients define and pursue their pathways to success in commercial and government markets with high technological barriers. Whether it's pursuing a market adjacency, winning work with a new customer, or fielding a new product or service, we can maximize your Pwin or minimize your product's time-to-market and risk.
We build strategies on strong data foundations, and then act on them with urgency and flexibility.
About Us
We thrive on taking the good – good people, good ideas, good products, good market positions – and helping to make them great. We get energized by finding the winning angle for their challenge, by studying the requirements and the players and the possible pathways to arrive at the best route, and then helping them to pursue it relentlessly for the win. We seek meaningful missions with honorable people where we can change the world together, and have fun doing it.
“Success is doing ordinary things extraordinarily well.”
Using our decades of collective aerospace technical & management experience at major aerospace companies, along with our global network of government and industry contacts, we help you with the front end of your business no matter how big or small you are:
Market / Opportunity Analysis and Competitive Assessment
Business Development (capture strategy, campaign management)
Product Development
Export Strategy (EAR99 / ITAR / OFAC compliance for DCS, FMS, and FMF transactions; Industrial Offsets; In-Country Partnerships; Licensed Manufacturing; U.S. Government coordination CONUS & OCONUS)
Proposal Win Strategy & Production (in both commercial and FAR-compliant environments)
Sales Representation & Product Advocacy
Introductions
We are big-company capability for you without the burden of full-time SME staff; when the project ends, we simply move on to the next client's work. We've helped companies large and small develop products and win business for commercial, civil, and military applications. We know what it takes to be successful in aerospace and defense, be it UNCLASS or SECRET, Commerce or State Department regulated. To date, our collective direct win tally is $2.3 billion (USD) from U.S. Government agencies, military services, laboratories, FFRDCs, government agencies & ministries outside of the U.S., and commercial customers.
Unmanned Systems
UAVs, USVs, UUVs, Loitering Munitions, Robotic Satellites, Planetary robots. Whether they fly, crawl, swim, or explore other planets, this is our space.
Robotics
We work with brilliant robotic systems engineers in the industry. Sometimes the ground stations of their systems can fit in the breast pocket of an operator, but other times they are as big as a global network of antennas and control centers. We've worked with systems at each extreme, and in between.
Through our successes, our customers have fielded new launch vehicles, deployed satellites and space probes, delivered fleets of aircraft both manned and unmanned, developed special payloads for military missions in the air and undersea, integrated weapons systems into ground-based and airborne platforms, and even developed NATO-interoperable unmanned hunter-killer teams. One small company even took a large U.S. government contract one of our principals helped them win and went public 18 months later, with a market capitalization today of ~$5 billion USD.
We helped define the aircraft/stores interface for a then-new class of miniature smart munition, the Small Diameter Bomb (GBU-39 & -53), a weapon that blurs the lines between a guided munition and a drone. Defining the interface was a challenge, since this new weapon and bomb racks had to facilitate unfettered use by all legacy smart bomb-capable NATO fighter and bomber aircraft.
We’ve been working on some amazing things lately. Ongoing advancements in artificial intelligence & autonomy, augmented reality, energy storage, sensors, 3D printing, GPS-independent navigation, and assured communications in contested environments continue to feed the insatiable needs of industry and the military.
US DoD is pivoting from assumed air dominance conflict conditions to near-peer scenarios in multiple theaters, driving capabilities development in unmanned systems in multiple domains (swarming, Automated Target Recognition, MOSA / interoperability), typically coordinated with key allies. Unmanned systems / systems of systems, with high degrees of autonomy to maintain full capability even in electronically jammed environments, are the recognized need.
Ukrainian Switchblade 600 loitering munitions destroy Russian S-300VM and TOR-M2 mobile missile systems.
Russian aggression in Ukraine initially fueled massive US & coalition military aid packages containing current-day solutions. The war has shown that loitering munitions are the new must-have weapons system for ground forces to prevail in extended conflicts. But the conflict is also forcing the urgent development of new inexpensive lethal drones fieldable in very high volumes. U.S. DoD’s Replicator Initiative is now delivering its first hardware tranche of many toward this goal. But Ukraine waits for no one in their fight for survival — they also have 200+ Ukrainian companies modifying COTS drones for combat use, with a combined production rate now exceeding 100,000 units per month as of February 2024. And Ukraine’s unending lethal USV attacks on Russian naval vessels in the Black Sea have forced Russia to shift its supply lines elsewhere, adding weeks to delivery times.
A Ukrainian soldier performing strikes on Russian forces, using hobbyist FPV drone technology modified by Ukraine to carry munitions. As of early 2024, Ukrainian forces currently attrit over 30,000 drones like these per month; a year later, this number had grown to 100,000 drones per month.
Russian forces on the receiving end of Ukrainian FPV drone strikes.
Ukrainian wolf-pack of USVs eludes Russian defenses and attacks Russian ships in the Crimean port of Sevastopol.
On the other side of the world, China’s massive naval force build-up and rising regional aggression over the last two decades has led to many neighboring countries now ramping up investments in commensurate defensive capabilities. Some of these neighbors have even begun to relax traditional local-content rules for procuring weapons systems, out of fear of potentially not obtaining the required defensive capability in time. These include Taiwan, South Korea (ROK), the Philippines, Japan, and others.
Since 2013, China has not only expanded its military footprint on the Paracel Islands, but also has engaged in unprecedented dredging and artificial island-building in the Spratly Islands beyond. China also controls Scarborough Shoal, which they seized in 2012 via a constant Coast Guard presence but haven't built upon yet. The result is 27 military outposts spread far across the South China Sea, from which they have been challenging free passage thru int’l waters. Nearly $4 trillion in trade transits this sea each year, with more than $1 trillion of that linked to the U.S. market. The sea is also home to ~$2.6 trillion in recoverable offshore oil and gas.
US and coalition efforts to experiment & develop multi-domain manned/unmanned maritime capabilities initially centered on countering aggression in European and Middle East waters, which continue into present-day. Inevitably these experimental efforts spread to also include 7th Fleet’s concerns in Asia-Pacific waters, becoming a focus area for their multi-year Integrated Battle Problem (IBP) experiments — as well as for other classified initiatives.
The U.S. 5th Fleet conducted unmanned exercise "Digital Talon 2.0" in the Arabian Gulf.
The U.S. 7th Fleet conducts an unmanned loitering munition strike on a simulated FAC/FIAC during unmanned exercise IBP 24.1 in the Pacific.
In addition to these tactical efforts being made to counter escalating global aggression, major strategic moves are also occurring — much more than just Finland and Sweden joining NATO. In 2021, the US and UK committed to bringing Australia into the nuclear-powered fast-attack submarine club with the announcement of the AUKUS trilateral security partnership. However, AUKUS is much broader that just transferring nuclear submarine-building know-how; technologies being transferred in Pillar 2 include artificial intelligence (AI), quantum technologies, information sharing, and cyber, undersea, hypersonic, and counter-hypersonic, and electronic warfare.
To facilitate AUKUS technology transfers between the 3 nations, each has implemented landmark export control reforms. In March 2024, Japan stated their intention to join Pillar 2 of AUKUS, followed shortly afterwards by interest from South Korea (ROK) and New Zealand. AUKUS could end up becoming the defacto NATO of the Pacific, though the ultra-deep tech-sharing part of AUKUS may remain largely limited to the initial three nations.
AUKUS could be viewed as a containment box surrounding China.
But AUKUS is not the only game in town for strategic alliance leveraging. In July 2024, the U.S. announced that it will begin establishing a new military command in Japan to bolster security ties between the two countries, in accordance with the U.S.-Japan Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security. This is one of the biggest upgrades to the U.S.-Japan alliance since its inception, and moves command of the ~55,000 U.S. forces in Japan from INDOPACOM (6,200 km away in Hawaii) to Tokyo — eliminating any communications lag time between this new U.S. Joint Force Command and a corresponding new Japan Self Defense Forces joint HQ.
We’re well-experienced in business development in the theaters mentioned above, as unmanned systems solutions providers exporting to allies — and in most of the larger cases with in-country content as allowed by the U.S. government. If this sounds like the kind of thing you’re trying to pursue that you need help with, then it’s time to take action.
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“When you know what you want, and want it bad enough, you will find a way to get it.”
We are
a U.S. Small Business, originally established in 2011 as a California Corp. but now a Washington State Limited Liability Company, with a global network of partners & associates on six continents
We are a DDTC-registered broker & exporter of defense articles, related technical data, and defense services for multiple categories on the U.S. Munitions List (ITAR Part 121). We have staff cleared to U.S. DoD SECRET; higher / other clearance is obtainable with sponsorship. DUNS: 081231779 CAGE Code: 842S5
