B (135:15)
Yeah, pro. I mean by the time this air is probably a lot more. But yeah, one of the, again, things that I'm like, super proud of having that mission impact our Ukraine story is like, I, I think it's one. Our. Our results are unique. But the, the story is kind of interesting that in 2023, the British pushed out a bunch of V bats to the Ukrainians. We told them, hey, hive mind. Our AI pilot, it's not integrated yet. You're not going to like if GPS or communications is jam, like, it's not going to work. Because we were again, we had bots that company in late 21, and we're still in the integration process of the AI with the aircraft and making it a hardened capability British gave it. They're like, look, we just want to get equipment assets out to the Ukrainians. There's a major push coming in the spring. And so they pushed out VBATs. They pushed out lots of equipment jamming happened. VBATs failed right as we told them it would. Ukrainians basically said, hey, come back when you have this fixed. We still believe in the capability. Came back in June, May, June of 2024. And they're like, look, we're going to put it through an electronic warfare testing regimen. Went up against this three, four days of every jammer. They had seven jammers. GPS communications running max power. VBAT flying within 50ft. No impact on it. Right? Because we had integrated the AI pilot on. On board this time, they. They kind of strung us along here and said, look, like, all right, great that you passed the test. And this was unique. No one, they're like, no one's ever passed this test. It was. They were trying to make us fail with all these jammers. They said, okay, great, we'll put in letters of request to the US Government if it actually proves its worth on the battlefield. And we're like, well, you guys didn't tell us about this, but we're saying, said, okay, let's look. We're here to make mission impact. First operation ever flew. GPS communications was jammed. I don't think people realized it. It's completely jammed in Ukraine on the battlefield. And so every mission that we've done GPS and comms has been jammed. But our first mission that we did actually fun. The interesting part of the story is one of the interesting parts. One of the assumptions we made was that we asked them like, look, we're going to near the front. Is GPS going to be jammed on takeoff? They said, no, it's not going to be jammed on takeoff. So we go out to operate and lo and behold, GPS is jammed on takeoff. On this mission we're supposed to execute, VBAT starts flying in another direction because of GPS jamming, because we had assumed it was going to be available just for two takeoff. And what ends up happening is like six hours of our team driving through Ukraine, kind of like the movie Interstellar, when they're like going through the cornfields trying to capture the drone. Like that's what our team did. They land it. Ukrainians like yeah, I didn't think it was going to work on the battlefield. We're like, well, you guys gave us a bad assumption. Within 24 hours, team worked it, they came up with a software solution, right? It was just like basically changing an assumption. Tested it in Texas, pushed the software update to Ukraine. Next day we said, hey, give us, you know, we want to re, retake this mission. Execute the mission, do fine. On takeoff, executing the mission. Comms GPS jam the entire time. Target an SA11 bukovel surface to air missile system. Ukrainians call in Himars airburst round destroys the bukovel second target a second sample a 11 Bukaville surface to air missile system. HIMARS misses due to GPS jamming. The effectiveness of US weapon systems is really poor in these GPS jammed environments. So that leads to letters of request from the US Government and then president takes office and stops funding, which is again, I'm fine with the decision. As an American taxpayer, I understand it as shield AI. We're like, oh my God, we're at the finish line. And then like, you know, we're about to deliver capability. Thankfully, Europeans step up to the plate. They get VBAT aircraft over there and then we go through training with the Ukrainians January to March, and since April they have been absolutely lethal with the system. And so, God, there was like a, a two week period where we were executing four to six strikes every day, or enabling four to six strikes every single day, destroyed hundreds of millions of dollars of Russian equipment. It's a capability that they had never had long range ISR and targeting before. They were fighting a very tactical fight. But now with this capability to penetrate deeper into enemy held territory while gps, while comms is jammed, they were finding targets that they had been looking for for six, nine months they couldn't find. Wow. And so again, super proud of the impact that we've played there. And you know, as we think about, you know, when we talk to them now, they're like, man, if we had been able to put up a bunch of these on our border, right? And knowing that every single vbat's tied into some sort of long range weapon system, you could deter your adversaries. And so as we look to, you know, the Pacific, that's something that we think about a lot. We see that out of you know, a country like Taiwan that is absolutely trying to deter adversaries, it's like, well you have to have the equipment that the adversary respects to deter them. And so, you know, I'm thankful that like VBAT is one of these things that has been battlefield proven and to the point, like what I'm just going to hammer home in on again, like there aren't other US companies doing this. Like they are not having success in these GPS and comms jammed environments. It is a very hard, hard problem. I actually would say that there's only two companies in the world and I can't name the other company that's actually finding success there. It's a Ukrainian company in these environments. And that's from reporting from, you know, call it the war fighters out there in terms of like actually executing the ISR and targeting a mission. Now tactically, when you're talking like fiber optic connected quadcopters where the GPS like where you're tethered to something and you can fight in the you know, 1 to 10 kilometer range, yes, there's like a lot of tactical innovations happening on that end. But at like the strategic operational level, proud that SHIELD AI stands along and again, congratulations.
