Brandon Tseng

They called it the John Henry test, because man versus machine.

And they sent the quadcopter into a house clearing problem down at La Posta.

And they gave a SEAL squad the exact same problem.

Quadcopter solved the problem faster.

And at the end of this problem, this house clearing problem, there's a house born NID, which was a way for the SEAL teams to say, yeah, it doesn't matter.

You cleared the building, but you still get blown up.

And so seeing the reaction from the guys after that, they're like, okay, like I can see why this is like a valuable capability, even with all its flaws.

And it had a lot of flaws back in 2017, 2018 timeframe, but they took it overseas, found utility out of it.

Um, and so, you know, I was very proud of that product and actually working a lot with the, the army also was probably even a bigger user of the product than, uh, the SEAL teams were.

And again, this was like early days innovation.

Holy smokes.

The team must've been like 40 people at this stage in the game.

Um, but like, again, proud of like, no one had ever seen this thing before.

No one, a lot of people had.

talked about autonomous systems they put it in their 10 15 year road map and here it was completely you know going through these house clearing problems by itself damn i mean do you are you on site when they're when these exercises are going on or yeah yeah we were um we were working hand in hand with these guys so so what's it like when you see

Um, like, so one, it augments a mission.

I don't want to say it takes a job.

And I think everybody understands that.

And the thing that I think a lot of folks understood in the SEAL teams and SOCOM writ large was, hey, this thing, like, close quarters combat is a really cool thing to train to.

It's a lot of fun doing it.