True Anomaly CEO: The future is "space warfare, flat out"
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Photo illustration: Axios Visuals. Photo: Courtesy of True Anomaly
For True Anomaly CEO Even Rogers, the future of defense conjures thoughts of "space warfare, flat out."
- "Warfare is becoming autonomous. It's becoming multi-domain, and it's becoming an activity that happens in the gray zone," he told Axios in an interview.
- "There's all this entanglement around economics, politics and warfare," he added, "and the battlefield just looks very, very different than it used to."
Why he matters: Rogers is — as he puts it — a former space operations officer, commercial fisherman and grease monkey.
- His company in April announced a $260 million Series C.
Q: When will wars be waged solely by robots?
A: When the robots finally wipe out humanity and fight amongst themselves.
Q: What's the biggest challenge the defense industry faces at the moment?
A: The pace of our adversaries relative to the pace of the innovation and purchasing engine within the Department of Defense.
- Most folks don't talk about both sides of that, they only talk about what's wrong with DOD acquisitions.
- The pace of adversary development of asymmetric technologies — like space weapons and hypersonic weapons and cyber weapons and low-cost autonomous and attritable drones — is really what's driving the need to have a change in buying behavior by the Defense Department.
Q: What region of the world should we be watching? Why?
A: The region of the world we should be watching isn't on the planet. It's in space. It's the orbital environment. It's cislunar space.
- The competitive landscape is now extending not just from low Earth orbit and medium Earth orbit and GEO, but now out to cislunar, as China, in particular, begins to get significant momentum in its civil and military space programs.
Q: How many emails do you get a day, and how do you deal with them?
A: I don't. My chief of staff does. I ignore them all.
Q: What's a piece of gear or tech you can't go without?
A: My Whoop.
Q: What advice would you give your younger self?
A: Don't date what's her face.
