The Indo-Pacific region is driving development and production of unmanned systems as countries look to build out drone fleets that can provide reconnaissance, logistics and offensive and defensive capabilities.
Meeting those needs requires design and production processes that can quickly adapt to new threats. Breaking Defense spoke with Stayne Hoff, director, business development – Asia-Pacific, at Red Cat about how these challenges are being met.
Is the design and capability of a drone for the Indo-Pacific any different than what, say, Ukraine needs? Or is it first person view, ISR, those kinds of capabilities?
There are some guiding trends or principles you can glean from the war in Ukraine or Asia-Pacific, but with Taiwan it’s a different scenario. Ukraine is using drones that they can afford or that they’re given or that they can mass produce. They’ve been experts at spooling up their own indigenous capacity to manufacture, making something like 300,000 internally every month and using them; that’s an amazing story.
It’s easy for allies in the Asia-Pacific region to also think about doing the same. There are all sorts of new initiatives kicking off where they’re experimenting just like the US Army is now. The Army has a program called PBAS, or Purpose Built Attritable System. Everybody’s playing with that, trying to figure out how they would use it. What we like to focus on is pairing that with the right ISR solution and with clever collaborative engagements so that they can operate as a Wolf Pack hunter-killer team.
How will autonomy play a role in the region?
Autonomy is on everything. It’s changing loitering, munitions, it’s changing all classes of UAS, ground systems, surface warfare. AI is amazing, but the devil’s in the details how to put it together so that it’s reliable, deterministic, and effective, and can operate in contested or denied environments with trusted levels of resilience.
That’s what everybody’s experimenting with right now, including us and some of our customers. Most of our competition is trying to figure out how to put that capability, whether we develop it or not, onto our platforms and into our solutions that are offered. We recognize that some customers feel like they already have that nailed down and they would prefer for that to be integrated into our systems for their adoption. We’re fine with that, too. In fact, our default is to partner with technology partners to get best-of-class capabilities onto our systems. If a customer says, I want you to put this flavor of this capability on your standard offering, we’re fine with that. We’re used to that.
What differentiates companies like yours from traditional primes?
It’s a good question because the US Army is making some sizable awards to small, newer, younger companies and that gives companies like Red Cat a lot of excitement. We’re not fighting a losing battle.
There are three different types of companies that are having success. There’s what we’re talking about with Red Cat and others. We’re small, but we’re smart, responsive, fast, well financed and don’t have a lot of legacy hardware systems that slow us down from moving fast where we feel like we have to protect that position. We just run.
There’s another group, the AI-centric, venture-capital-funded defense places like Anduril, Shield AI and the monster there, Palantir. They’ve come in over the last several years and are making an interesting play, getting good traction to sustain.
Then there’s a third flavor, which I call the unmanned systems consolidators. Some of them are new, some of them are old. They’re aggregators that are hoovering up cool stuff and then offering not just a cool widget, but a cool family of widgets that ends up being a unique solution.
What sort of commercial innovation can you offer Asia-Pacific companies?
It’s an international version of what we already do. We partner with companies to bring leading edge, cool tech into our solution. Red Cat is part of DIU’s Blue UAS initiative. That was kicked off in 2020 and was meant to create a small-UAS industrial base in America to give the Department of Defense an alternative to Chinese solutions like DJI or Yuneec. There’s at least three dozen companies like ourselves that have responded to and had our UAS systems Blue UAS qualified.
The Army’s SRR (short-range reconnaissance) program was the first one to buy from that pool of suppliers. We were happy to be picked for tranche two, which is production on short-range reconnaissance. That standard, that cyber-secure definition, a gold seal of approval on your system, it’s become so compelling that there are other larger-class UAVs and international UAVs that are getting certified to Blue UAS.
We expect that type of a certification to manifest itself in other forms, maybe a European Union form, maybe an Asian form, maybe country specific. Until then Blue UAS is the way to go. And when we’re looking for technology partners, let’s say industrial partners in a country, we are attracted to ones that can also bring in technology, whether they have it or whether they have already incorporated that from other suppliers on their solutions. They can help us incorporate those onto ours. That increases the local content and the attractiveness of our resulting offering to the host nation we’re trying to sell to.
Companies or countries you may partner with in the Indo-Pacific may have their own interfaces or technologies. How do you overcome potential barriers to compatibility?
Woven into the Blue UAS initiative is the use of dual-use technologies. The goal was not just to replace the Chinese supply chain and develop small UAS; it was to bring bleeding edge commercial capabilities to the warfighter quickly in a compellingly cheap and high-quality manner. As we have developed solutions, we’re always mindful that we need to have a way to keep them fresh.
You’re perpetually running or at least walking fast to keep your product up to date. Everybody else in this space is doing the same thing. If you don’t do it, you’re going to be obsolete in a couple of years easily. You have to commit to doing that. If there’s a cool widget or a cool capability outside of the US, we incorporate that, too.
When we are trying to get a capability on our system, we’ll generally have at least a couple of sources of supply for that, especially if it’s an emerging technology where it’s not clear who may be the industry leader for that. You’re hedging your bets by maybe betting on a few different horses, as well as the fact that the winning technological solution may not be the best business choice. They may price it so it’s unaffordable. The market leader may not be the best tech, and we don’t know that. So we will play the field with two or even three different suppliers.
What does the future Indo-Pacific-specific unmanned industrial ecosystem look like in the next couple of years? Who do you think is best positioned to lead it?
There are a bunch of different factors, not just what technological offerings and companies and brain trust that exist in a given country size. We will see if Taiwan can do it. The challenge with Taiwan is it’s an island, so it’s easy to imagine a naval blockade making it difficult for them to supply you with something outside of that area. So maybe more mainland suppliers might be favored. It is probably going to be driven by geography to some extent, but it’s like asking how do you create a Silicon Valley somewhere else?
Some of it’s going to be serendipity, some of it will be overt. Investment Australia has dedicated themselves; their defense plan was released about three years ago and was updated a couple of years ago. They are positioning themselves to be the armory for the next coming conflict. So they’re tooling up building all sorts of stuff and favoring US companies to come over and build additional factories there for artillery, drones, loitering, munitions, missiles.
They’re in a good position, and somewhat far away from where the conflict is expected to maybe initially start or focus on. I would e
