All Quiet on the Second Front

Breaking into aviation as a startup means years of quiet, brutal work with nothing to show for it publicly. Zach Shore calls it startups on hard mode: the pain is real, but the moat is massive. Now Hermeus is the fastest company in history from founding to supersonic flight, and its newly minted CEO sits down with Tyler to explain how a small team out-built a 75-year-old industry. "Own the out...

Getting AI out of the POC and into production has been the defining challenge of the last three years. Brian Raymond has lived it from the inside — building infrastructure, mistiming bets, and figuring out in real time what "enterprise-ready" actually requires. This episode covers: What it takes to get AI out of the demo and into production at scale Why senior engineering judgment matters...

High-level policy decrees and exciting national security headlines don't win wars. Execution does. This week, Meagan Metzger (Founder & CEO of Dcode) joins Tyler Sweatt to pull back the curtain on the unsexy, high-stakes reality of defense acquisition reform. While leadership pushes for rapid commercial tech adoption, the "fingers-on-keyboards" workforce is left managing legacy con...

At some point, every founder runs into reality. Not just the pitch or the vision. But the part where it breaks, gets hard, and no one is coming to fix it for you. This is where most companies are decided. Paige Craig (Managing Founder & Partner at Outlander VC) joins guest host Sam Gray to break down how he evaluates founders in defense tech: how conviction is earned, what stands out early, an...

Cyber isn’t just a compliance problem anymore. It’s operational. It’s persistent. And it’s moving faster than the systems built to manage it. Katherine Sutton (Assistant Secretary of War for Cyber Policy and the Principal Cyber Advisor to the Secretary of War) joins Tyler Sweatt to talk about keeping pace across policy, technology, training, experimentation, and most importantly - the people. What...

John Price, Founder and CEO of Highground, has worked across special operations, the Senate, and private markets. Now, he’s focused on helping investors and builders understand what the government actually wants and how it buys. He joins Tyler Sweatt to break down how demand shows up, where teams misread it, and how to identify where real programs—and real money—actually sit. What’s happening on t...

Today, Armada is opening its first Galleon Experience Center in Washington, DC. A live environment showcasing what it actually takes to run AI at the edge—bringing together ruggedized infrastructure, cloud, and secure software deployment. With 2F Frontier as part of the stack, extending DevSecOps to disconnected, real-world environments. And with Offset 2026 right around the corner, it felt like t...

Are we even having an honest conversation about AI? Right now the public discourse seems to bounce between two extremes: AI will save the world and AI will destroy the world. Neither is particularly helpful. The more interesting questions are things like: Why is there so much distrust of AI? How should governments actually think about adoption? And how can technology shorten the distance between k...

Winning a contract isn’t the same as deploying capability. This week, Andrew Vanderhoof (Director of DAF CLOUDworks at AFRL) joins Tyler to talk about what actually happens between “award” and “operational.” They cover: Getting commercial software into classified environments Why OTAs and zero-dollar agreements matter The real weight carried by DAOs and AOs Scaling innovation without breaking trus...

Government contracting moves $750B+ a year. But the system still runs on PDFs, spreadsheets, and human bottlenecks. This week, Derek Hoyt — CEO & Co-Founder of GovSignals — joins Tyler to talk about what happens when you aim AI directly at procurement. They dig into: Why contracting shops are gutted but the dollars keep growing The hidden cost of B&P burn inside defense companies Why most...

If we want to win the next fight, we have to outlearn first. This week, Tyler sits down with Sir Tom Copinger-Symes, former Deputy Commander of UK's Cyber & Specialist Command (CSOC), to talk about the hard shift from infantry officer to cyber leader — and what that journey reveals about where defense is behind. What’s happening on the second front: Industrial-age systems in an information...

This week on All Quiet on the Second Front, Tyler sits down with Brian MacCarthy to talk about why defense innovation keeps getting stuck between good ideas and real delivery. They dig into why the ecosystem keeps confusing motion with progress, and what it takes to get past pilots and into production. What’s Happening on the Second Front: Why capital without execution doesn’t move the mission The...

Leaving the uniform doesn’t mean leaving your identity behind. In this episode of All Quiet on the Second Front , Tyler Sweatt sits down with Bill Wall — former Green Beret, JSOC veteran, and CEO of Accrete AI Government — to talk about transition, purpose, and why the skills forged in special operations translate far beyond the battlefield. What's happening on the Second Front: How military f...

In this episode of All Quiet on the Second Front, Tyler sits down with former US Congressman Brad Carson to examine one perspective in the evolving debate around AI governance, public trust, and national security. Brad brings decades of experience across government, academia, and policy, having served two terms in the U.S. House of Representatives and in senior Department of Defense leadership rol...

On this episode of All Quiet on the Second Front, Tyler Sweatt sits down with Meghan Moretti, CEO of the Johnny Mac Soldiers Fund, to talk about service beyond the uniform and what it takes to sustain impact long after the fight fades from the headlines. A West Point classmate and former Army MP, Meghan shares her path from the military to healthcare to leading one of the most impactful military f...

In this episode of All Quiet on the Second Front , Tyler Sweatt is joined by Fred Thomas, UK Member of Parliament for Plymouth Moor View, Royal Marines Reservist, and member of the House of Commons Defence Committee. Fred brings a perspective shaped by time in uniform and now inside Parliament, where he focuses on modernizing defense capability and accelerating the adoption of new technology. Toge...

This week, Tyler is joined by Adam Lackey, COO of Onebrief, for a conversation on building mission-ready software that operators champion. Adam breaks down how Onebrief’s culture of iteration, empathy, and urgency shapes everything—from watching users stress-test the product to delivering changes in hours, not days. They dig into Onebrief’s evolution from a kanban board to a full mission-planning...

The defense ecosystem works best when it works together. Mission Cultivate is helping make that happen. Tyler Sweatt sits down with Robert Fehlen, Managing Principal at Dark Corner Solutions and Mission Cultivate, to talk about what comes after the startup buzz: how lessons from Mobilize Vision led to a platform built to connect the fragmented defense ecosystem. They unpack what’s broken in today’...

Government bureaucracy isn’t exactly the sexiest problem in defense—but it’s one of the most painful.  In this episode, host Tyler Sweatt sits down with Zachary Long, Founder of ConductorAI and former Palantir leader, to unpack how his team is taking on one of the biggest bottlenecks in government operations: paperwork. From automating complex approval chains to bridging the gap between policy and...

Tyler sits down with Tyler Xuan Saltsman, co-founder and CEO of EdgeRunner AI, to talk about building air-gapped, domain-specific AI for the warfighter. From his time as a Penn State wrestler and Army logistics officer to leading supercompute projects at AWS and Stability AI, Saltsman’s journey has been about speed, precision, and making technology usable where it matters most: at the tactical edg...

Tyler chats with Andrew Black, co-founder and CEO of Kovr.ai and former AWS Emerging Tech lead, about the unsexy work that makes mission software real: turning security and compliance into something fast, predictable, and built into the dev loop. Andrew explains how Kovr.ai reads system docs, maps to NIST 800-53, drafts control implementations, flags gaps, and recommends fixes, so engineers focus...

On this episode of All Quiet on the Second Front, Tyler sits down with Geoff Wylde, VP and General Manager of ŌURA to talk about what happens when consumer tech collides with national security. What started as a global health project in 2019 quickly became a breakthrough for the U.S. military: using the ŌURA Ring to predict illness, monitor fatigue, and give commanders and operators real-time insi...

On this special customer spotlight episode, Tyler sits down with Ivan Zhang, co-founder of Cohere, to unpack the evolution of secure, operationally effective AI—from research lab to real-world deployments.  Whether you're an AI builder, a public-sector leader, or just someone curious about where next-gen models are heading, this episode dives into what it really takes to deploy language models...

For our 100th episode—and our first ever live recording—former Acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller flips the script and interviews host Tyler Sweatt. What follows is equal parts roast, reflection, and rallying cry. Tyler opens up about choosing West Point, serving after 9/11, life as a combat engineer in Afghanistan, and the winding path that led him to build and lead Second Front Systems. Ch...

What happens when a bunch of Palantir and Lockheed alums get fed up with how hard it is to do business with the government—and actually do something about it? You get Pryzm: the common operating system for capture. In this episode, Tyler sits down with Nick LaRovere, co-founder and CEO of Pryzm, to talk about building for the part of the defense ecosystem everyone hates (but no one can ignore): pr...