Techquisition: $1.5 Trillion Defense Budget Request Explained

On September 30, Secretary Pete Hegseth signed a memo titled Project Agincourt: Pathway to the Autonomous Warfare Command, a plan for a new four-star command built around autonomous warfare. It would be the first functional combatant command stood up from scratch since SOCOM and TRANSCOM in 1987.Maggie and David bring on Bill Greenwalt of the American Enterprise Institute, former Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Industrial Policy and a longtime Senate Armed Services Committee staffer, for an emergency breakdown.What is a combatant command in the first place? Why is building a new one so rare? And does this turn into a real speed play for autonomy, or just another layer of bureaucracy? Greenwalt's test is simple: are builders working side by side with operators, or three chains removed through the primes and integrators?Plus: what founders should be watching, from DIU's role as the commercial on-ramp to the elevation of Owen West at the unmanned systems DRPM. As always, please let us know what you think. And please reach out if you or anyone you know is building at the intersection of technology and national security.

Commercial tech that works can still take years to reach the warfighter. The bottleneck usually isn't the technology. It's everything in between. Sarah Pearson, Director of Strategy at the Defense Innovation Unit, joins us to break down The Bridge, DIU's initiative to systematically tear down the barriers that stall commercial capabilities inside the department. Drawing on lessons from 600+ prototypes, she walks through the three big ones: getting companies cleared and into classified space, fixing the ATO and RMF accreditation process, and bringing test and evaluation left so products are buyable from day one. Sarah also shares what success looks like within 12 months, and a direct call to action for the builders, policymakers, investors, and buyers who make it all move. As always, please let us know what you think. And please reach out if you or anyone you know is building at the intersection of technology and national security. Explore Shield Capital's portfolio and thesis at: https://shieldcap.com/Follow Shield Capital and the Mission Matter Podcast on LinkedIn to catch every episode of Mission Matters: https://www.linkedin.com/company/mission-matters-podcast/

Cyber offense is moving to machine speed, and human-speed defense can't keep up. In this episode of the Mission Matters podcast, we sit down with Lou Manousos, co-founder and CEO of Ent Security, to talk about defending at machine speed in the age of AI. Ent is building intent-aware cybersecurity: edge-deployed AI agents that run at the operating system layer to detect and prevent attacks in real time, with full context of a user's normal behavior. Founded in 2025, Ent has raised more than $100 million and is working with enterprises across financial services, defense, hospitality, and more. Lou is a five-time cybersecurity founder whose last company, RiskIQ, was acquired by Microsoft, where he stayed on to lead early development of their security copilot product. We get into the current state of AI for offensive and defensive cyber, the closed vs. open model debate, why he believes the industry has to shift back to prevention, and what it takes to build trust for autonomous agents on mission-critical systems. As always, please let us know what you think. And please reach out if you or anyone you know is building at the intersection of technology and national security.

Ben Kohlmann is the Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Manpower and Reserve Affairs, the chief talent officer for a workforce of more than a million people. A former F-18 carrier pilot who went on to work in venture capital and run a hard-tech startup, he now oversees recruiting, retention, and readiness across the Department of the Navy. Maggie Gray and David Rothzeid talk with him about moving the Navy's personnel system out of the industrial age, bringing commercial tech talent into uniform through the Naval Innovation Unit, reforming shipyard pay to compete with the private sector, and preparing for the demographic cliff coming to military recruiting.

Language models aren't the only path to intelligence. For physics, the primitive is fields.In this episode of the Mission Matters Podcast, Maggie Gray and Akhil Iyer sit down with Pratap Ranade, CEO & Co-Founder of Arena Physica, to discuss how he and his team are building electromagnetic superintelligence. Pratap breaks down Atlas, an agentic platform that pairs non-deterministic AI agents with deterministic physics and simulation models, and Heaviside, the first foundation model for RF design, trained on electromagnetic fields instead of words.They cover why hardware's software-defined future makes electromagnetism matter more than ever, how Heaviside hit its "GPT-1 moment" with fully autonomous RF design, how Arena generates training data in a field with none publicly available, the pivot that deleted a double-digit-million revenue stream, and Pratap's vision for a new kind of Bell Labs.As always, please let us know what you think. And please reach out if you or anyone you know is building at the intersection of technology and national security. Explore Shield Capital's portfolio and thesis at: https://shieldcap.com/Follow Shield Capital and the Mission Matter Podcast on LinkedIn to catch every episode of Mission Matters: https://www.linkedin.com/company/mission-matters-podcast/ Visit Arena Physica's website: https://www.arenaphysica.com/0:00 – Introduction2:37 – What is electromagnetic superintelligence?5:20 – The current state of design tools8:09 – What "software-defined" actually means12:28 – Pairing non-deterministic agents with deterministic physics18:01 – Building a foundation model for RF22:43 – Where the training data comes from25:06 – From pilot to rollout: patterns across industries30:05 – Winning over the skeptics34:48 – Using Atlas internally: DJI drone teardowns36:59 – The vision: a new Bell Labs40:08 – The hardest moment building Arena43:08 – Closing advice: build stupidly ambitious things