It’s still going on. We’ve set up towers along the southern border and the northern border. It is part of Congress’ annual budget. But the bulk of our work was on the military side. There will be no multi-billion contracts to massively expand the border work.
When I visited the border with you in early 2018, it was just before we heard about divorced families and other miseries. How do you feel about that?
I am still very proud of our work with border security. The reality is that whatever you want immigration policy to be, you need to know what’s going on across the border. You’ve seen this with the Biden administration. They have changed the policy on how to deal with people crossing the border, but they still want to know if people are smuggling drugs into the US, weapons from the US, money back and forth. Whatever your immigration policy, few people want them to be unaware of it. So I think that’s one of the reasons why we continue to do well, even on border security with the new government.
It seems the shift from building a wall to guarding the border is helping you.
Yes. The first deployment Customs and Border Protection paid us for was in an area where there was already a 19-foot steel barrier, but it still didn’t stop traffic.
Your main focus is what you call Lattice, a way of connecting many different sensors and technologies for soldiers to see what’s happening on the battlefield in real time. How are you?
We work with every major branch of the US military. We do a lot of work with the British Ministry of Defense and the Australian Army. The nice thing is that they all agree that they want their stuff to be interoperable. The goal of Lattice is to fuse all the sensors and all the effectors that DOD has, not just the stuff we make. I had a recent AVMS [Adaptive Vehicle Monitoring System] exercise, in which we merged several dozen different existing systems. We’ve used the system in a naval destroyer and its weapons systems, and we’ve used it in some manned fighter jets. Lattice creates an image that highlights relevant things and then sends that data in real time to the people who need to know about it.
Autonomous weapons are a controversial topic. Should we be okay with AI-based systems pulling the trigger?
we have that Today† I’ve talked to people who say, “We must ban the development of autonomous weapon systems before it’s too late,” but they already exist, such as the nearby weapon systems that protect our aircraft carriers from incoming missiles. We have cruise missiles that can hit surface-to-air missiles — they basically fly into a general area, look for electronic emissions, and strike without sending communications home. There is no other way to solve the problem. You can’t literally make a person responsible for pulling the trigger in all cases. It’s about making sure that the responsibility for them always falls on one person. You have to design ways of thinking about deploying autonomous weapons that make sure that thinking happens before the trigger is pulled.
