Defense Tech Is More Than One Kind of Hardware

For our February 26 San Diego Hardware Meetup, we decided to focus the evening on defense tech.

What I liked about the lineup was how different the three presentations were.

We had Tom Cotton, Lead Product Engineer at Motive Labs, presenting passive exoskeleton footwear. Ryan Roberts, CEO of QHR, talking about tactical communications and acoustics. And Clayton Karmel, founder of DroneKyll, presenting their approach to countering small drones.

Three very different products.

But all three were dealing with something I think is pretty central to defense hardware: building for environments where the constraints are real, the user matters a lot, and failure has consequences.

Starting with the person carrying the hardware

Tom’s presentation on Flyband looked at something we don’t always immediately associate with defense tech: footwear.

Military personnel can carry significant loads over long distances, which creates fatigue and injury problems. Motive Labs is developing passive exoskeleton technology integrated directly into boots and shoes, without motors, batteries or electronics.

What stood out to me was how much of the development is tied back to the person actually wearing the product.

That sounds obvious, but it is easy in hardware to focus on what performs best on a test bench. A boot is different.

Someone has to walk with it, carry weight with it, wear it for hours and trust that it won’t create another problem while solving the first one.

Motive Labs also talked about some of the challenges that appear once you move beyond the concept itself: molds, injection molding, materials, supply chain, nearshoring and reducing the time between a design change and getting something back into field testing.

That part felt very familiar to me. The technology can work and you can still have a long way to go before you have a product.

A headset can become a system problem

Ryan’s presentation started from a very different place.

He described trying to communicate in an extremely noisy environment while flying a paramotor.

The original problem looked acoustic: he couldn’t reliably hear his team, maintain the connectivity he needed or capture what he was experiencing.

But the conclusion wasn’t simply to design a better headset. It was to rethink the signal chain around it.

I liked that because I think it happens pretty often in hardware.

You start with:

This component isn’t working well enough.

Then you dig into it and realize the actual problem sits one or two levels higher in the system.

QHR’s approach is built around combining different audio sources and processing them digitally so that radio, environmental sound, voice and other inputs can become part of one system rather than several disconnected ones.

For tactical equipment, that can also change what the product is for. The headset isn’t only helping the operator communicate anymore.

It can become part of how an event is captured and understood afterward.

That was an interesting shift in perspective.

Defense also has an economics problem

Clayton’s presentation on DroneKyll moved us into counter-UAS.

His starting point was the growing challenge created by inexpensive commercial drones.

If the threat itself can be deployed cheaply and in large numbers, then using a very expensive response every time creates a difficult economic equation.

DroneKyll is approaching that from the other direction: trying to create a smaller and lower-cost counter-drone solution using modular, commercially available technologies where they make sense.

What interested me here was the product-development question behind it.

Defense hardware can become extremely complex. But complexity isn’t automatically value.

Sometimes the better engineering question is: What actually needs to be custom? And what can already available technology do well enough?

That decision affects cost, development time, manufacturability and eventually how realistically something can be deployed at scale.

Three sides of defense tech

I think the evening was a good reminder that defense tech isn’t one category of product.

It can mean helping someone move more efficiently.

It can mean making communication work in an environment where the noise itself becomes a technical problem.

It can mean finding a more economical response to a new type of threat.

The products can look completely different.

But underneath them, I heard a lot of the same questions I hear across hardware generally.

What does the user actually need? What happens when the product leaves the lab? Which parts should be custom? Can you manufacture it? Can you support it? Can it scale? And does the technology still make sense when you put it into the environment where it actually has to work?

One last thought

One reason I like having a specific theme for some of our Hardware Meetups is that it lets us look at an industry from several different angles.

Defense tech could easily have been three presentations about drones.

Instead, we talked about mobility, acoustics, communications and counter-UAS.

For me, that made the conversation much more interesting.

It also showed how broad the hardware challenges inside defense really are.

A big thank you to Tom, Ryan and Clayton for sharing what they’re working on, to Downtown Works Mission Valley for hosting us, and to informal for supporting the Hardware Meetup community.