JobsOhio's pursuit of defense partnerships: Weapons and Warfare

Hello, and welcome to another edition of Weapons and Warfare

For Straight Arrow News, I'm your host, Ryan Robertson. And as you can see, we took the show on the road once again

We are in National Harbor, Maryland, for this year's Navy League's Sea Airspace Global Maritime Exposition

Over the next few days, we'll be covering some of the stories that are helping shape and define the U.S. Navy

as it continues to modernize and prepare for whatever conflicts the future may hold

But this week we are focused on the business of attracting business

and one of the main players in this game is the state of Ohio

Home to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and soon Anderle Industries recently announced Arsenal Facility

See how some innovative thinking is luring billion-dollar companies with thousands of jobs to the Buckeye State

and making sure meaningful information does not fall through the cracks. Raft AI is building a platform to make sure the military decision makers

have the data they need to make the critical decisions in the moments they matter most

It's our weapon of the week. But first, some headlines you may have missed

February and March were busy months for U.S. Central Command. In addition to renewed strikes on Houthi positions in Yemen

CENTCOM leadership says they were able to take out a senior military leader for al-Qaeda

and the number two in charge of ISIS. In late February, CENTCOM says they carried out a precise airstrike in northwest Syria

that successfully took out Muhammad Yusuf Zia-Talay, the senior military leader of Haras al-Din, or HAD, which is an al-Qaeda affiliate

Of the strike, General Michael Eric Carilla, the commander of U.S. Central Command, emphasized

As we have said in the past, we will continue to relentlessly pursue these terrorists to defend our homeland as well as U.S. allied and partner personnel in the region

A little more than two weeks later, CENTCOM says an airstrike in cooperation with Iraq killed the top ISIS leader in that country

Abdallah Maki Musleh al-Rafai, known as Abu Khadija, and one other ISIS operative

After the strike, which Central Command says happened on March 13th, a DNA test on the deceased's remains confirmed Abu Khadija was killed

Oshkosh Defense just rolled out a new and improved version of its Rogue Fires vehicle

mounted rocket system, and this time it's equipped with the same munitions

used in the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, aka HIMARS. Rogue Fires, a system we've profiled before, stands for Remotely Operated Ground Unit for

Expeditionary Fires. It's an unmanned system that can be reconfigured to provide long-range

high-impact fire support in modern combat situations. It can launch multiple rockets

quickly, making it incredibly versatile for ever-changing battlefield scenarios. Oshkosh says by integrating the Multiple Launch Rocket System, or MLRS, family of munitions into the Rogue Fires

they're showcasing the system's adaptable design, proving it can handle a variety of munitions and mission requirements

Built on the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle Platform, Rogue Fires is designed for precision, long-range fires and can even handle autonomous resupply operations

Plus, its powertrain can be set up for hybrid electric configurations, which means it can operate silently for those covert missions

The future USS Jeremiah Denton is dry docked no more. That's after HII's Ingalls Shipbuilding Division successfully launched the third Flight 3 Arleigh Burke-class destroyer built at its Mississippi shipyard

Currently known as DDG-129, shipbuilders transferred it from land to the company's dry dock

where the ship was floated and moved by tugboats to a pier at the shipyard

The new destroyer is named for former U.S. Senator Jeremiah Denton Jr.

a Vietnam War veteran who was awarded the Navy Cross for his heroism as a prisoner of war

Ingalls Shipbuilding has five Flight 3s currently under construction, including the future USS Ted Stevens, Sam Nunn, and Thad Cochran

According to a release from Ingalls the Denton will undergo final outfitting systems activation and testing before entering the fleet Industry It what drives any city state or country forward

In America, every state leans into what it does best. For some, that's agriculture. For others, it's tourism or mining for natural resources

For the state of Ohio, it's manufacturing. They're not only leaning into it, they're recruiting it

and positioning themselves to be an even bigger player in our nation's defense

That's because in January of this year, Anderle Industries announced that they were headed to the Buckeye State with some very ambitious plans

How ambitious? Well, the announced project is a 5 million square foot facility called Arsenal One

It's going to sit on 500 acres just south of the state capitol in Columbus

But why Ohio? It's the subject of this week's debrief. Attend any defense exhibition, and it's not uncommon to see states like Oklahoma, Virginia, or Ohio with a display of their own, hoping to lure new business inside their borders

Because new business means new jobs. The way we look at our mission is really what can we do to create jobs that provide a quality life for Ohioans

And whether it's in the military, aerospace, or one of the nine other sectors that we work in, that's really our mission is how many of those good quality jobs can we create for the state that not only creates a great life for the Ohioan that's going to get that job, but it's also going to offer a valuable return to the state economically

By any measure, January's announcement was seismic. We're here to announce that Andrel, one of the leading defense tech manufacturers in the world, is building Arsenal One here in Ohio

This is really historic. It is the biggest one project as far as the number of people who are going to be employed in all of Ohio history

And it really goes to our sweet spot. Our sweet spot is aviation, is national defense related products

Even with all of that on the state's side, Terry Slabaugh, the vice president of sites and infrastructure for Jobs Ohio

says landing companies like Anderil takes more than what's visible on the surface level

It used to be you had to have sites in your state. You had to have water, sewer

You had to have the infrastructure for an opportunity like Anderil. I think now companies want to know where is the talent going to come from

Where am I going to get the workforce? You know, Jobs Ohio is really focused, not just Jobs Ohio, but our governor and the administration on how we can amplify the talent that we have in the state and then how can we improve the talent

It's from that talent pool Anderle hopes to kickstart large-scale production of military-grade autonomous weapon systems, including drones, at a cost and pace that would keep the U.S. ahead of its near-peer adversaries like Russia and China

It's something Palmer Luckey pointed to in an interview when Arsenal 1 was announced

There's no other option. The whole point here, the reason we raised that $1.5 billion round

the reason that we've been accelerating this process, the reason that we're investing in building this factory ahead of the customer actually paying us to do it is because we

believe in that timeline because we have to believe in it. It is critical that we hit it

and I think we will. So what does that timeline look like? The plan is to manufacture the first

phase of the site and start production in mid-2026. Lucky went on to say Ohio gave Anderil the best

shot at hitting those goals, something that aligns with why Jobs Ohio targets companies like

Anderil. You know, we we don't count all the construction jobs, all the other jobs in retail

and ancillary services that are going to be created when we bring in an Anderil. You know

four thousand manufacturing jobs spins off a lot of other jobs into the economy. You know, we we

We don't really focus on all those other jobs because we're looking at the value that we're going to get from those jobs that we're creating through our incentives and what that return is to the state

But we know it has a huge impact on the economy. That impact cannot be understated The project is expected to yield more than 8 new jobs in total by 2035 with more than billion in annual economic output and over billion from in labor income will be generated with projected tax revenues estimated to be roughly million making the business of attracting business a smart one

Serving you clarity through context, our mission at SAN is to deliver the news straight down the middle

We're different from mainstream media because we spotlight distorted headlines and show you how to do it, too

Discover stories that right and left-leaning outlets are choosing not to cover by using our MediaMist tool

Download the SAN app and turn on notifications to have straight facts delivered right to your phone or tablet

And get straight facts anytime at SAN.com. The most valuable commodity I know of is information

Wouldn't you agree? Yes, Mr. Gecko, I do. And it's as true today as it was in the 1987 classic Wall Street

But how do you know you have all the information available to you? How do you know that you're not missing a crucial piece of data that could affect whatever it is you're trying to do

That's a problem the subject of our Weapon of the Week is trying to solve

Based in McLean, Virginia, Raft touts itself as a leading defense technology company dedicated to empowering the U.S. military and government agencies with cutting-edge AI machine learning and data solutions

To that end, in March, they released a new platform called AIMS, short for AI Mission Systems

Focused on solving a lot of the decision-making problems for different sorts of user personas

whether that be acquisition professionals, whether that be warfighters, whether that be policy makers or military decision makers

The focus is on helping them aid their decision making and getting them more accurate and faster decisions

One of the benefits of the U.S. having a military large enough to collect and compile troves of information is also a weakness if even some of that data fails to get to the people that need it

RAF's founder and CEO, Shubhi Mishra, says that's a problem Ames is designed to tackle

Unlike a lot of the large language models that are trained on the Internet

trained on all the data that exists outside the military, our platform is specifically trained on the doctrine, the data that makes these services possible

So it is not trained on the stuff that does not matter to a service

It's trained on what the pilots, the army soldiers, and all of the different services use to train their people

And that's what makes it very, very special. Mishra says this new platform cannot only bridge legacy systems with newly developed systems

but it can also do it at speed, at cost, and at scale

For both those problem sets, you require something that attaches to those legacy or new systems

and pulls that information together such that a user on the other end can make fast decisions, quick decisions

So going back to the question you asked, how does this get them faster, quicker, better information

It is just that. It is the conduit that transforms the information they have into the information they need

As for how it's working in the real world, Mishra says before Ames' public launch

Raft was working with people handling acquisition and contracting. That's a super hard job. And so how can that make them, how can this system make them faster and more accurate

and what we have tested out with them has increased their accuracy by 45

and made them faster by 30x%. So what does that mean? Essentially, Ames aggregates data collected by people all over the world

and gets it to the people who need it most. So they always had some way to get to the stuff

It took them months to get to it. A lot of phone calls

they have the data but they don't have tools to make sense of the data so what you have right now

is the tool they have in front of them where they can ask questions as opposed to learning the system so we have made it very intuitive using just you know how you use a chat GPT how you use any large language model Ask a question it give you the answer And the

beauty is it's trained on their data and it is trained on their doctrine

While Mishra wasn't yet able to talk about any specific details in place

she did say a lot of interest is being generated, with potential users looking to get AIMS onboarded soon

Time to hop into the way back machine for this week's comms check

We're going all the way back to episode three. That's right, 62 episodes ago

That's when we first told you about the Army's decision to buy hundreds of Block 2 and Block 3 variants of Raytheon's Coyote drone interceptor

And this week, there's a new variant making some news. recently raytheon was able to launch the new coyote l-e-sr uncrewed aerial system from a

helicopter the coyote family includes a rail launched missile variant designed for high-speed

counter uas and launched effects operations this new variant is part of a series that can be

deployed from the air ground or sea making it very versatile for different missions while images are

scarce, we do know Raytheon showcased the Coyote's LE capabilities at the US Army's

Experimental Demonstration Gateway event. We also learned that with collaborative autonomy, it can connect with nearby sensors to adapt its tactics in real time

More tests are scheduled through 2025. All opinions expressed in this segment are solely the opinions of the contributors

All right, folks, that's going to do it for us this week on Weapons and Warfare

Keep it tuned, though, because in the weeks and months ahead, we're going to be rolling out all of the stories and the content that we got here at National Harbor on the Navy League's Sea Airspace 2025 Expo

And if you like what you saw this week, be sure to like and subscribe to all of our social media feeds

We are on most of them. We need your help growing the show, so please help us out

For my wrap this week, I want to focus a little bit on the importance of clarity, especially clarity from leadership

Over the past few months, President Donald Trump and his staff have been on a mission to end wokeness in America

and stop any program that can be associated with DEI in any way

In the Department of Defense and the military as a whole, Sec Def Pete Hegseth ordered the removal of all news articles, photos, and videos promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion

But there was little clarity given on what constitutes a DEI article, photo, or video

And in the absence of direction, far too much was sacrificed on the altar of ending wokeness

Books that featured women who fought during the Civil War were removed from libraries

The Air Force briefly pulled lessons on the Tuskegee Airmen in its boot camp

The U.S. Naval Academy took down a display commemorating the first Jewish women to graduate from the institution

Countless hours were spent combing through every social media account run by the DoD or military

and there are a lot of them, making sure any picture or post featuring anything

that could be deemed a violation of the DEI order was removed

The Pentagon even took down a website honoring Jackie Robinson, an iconic sports hero to millions and an Army veteran

A portion of the removed content was restored. Hexith said some of it was removed by accident, some of it out of what he called malicious compliance

But if there was more clarity in the initial order, perhaps some of those accidents and cases of malicious compliance could have been avoided

In the absence of clear orders, troops and apparently AI programs run amok defaulted largely to what they knew would be considered safe content

Anything that featured white men. But guess what? There are a lot more people in the military than white men

And the history about how we got here makes us better for knowing it

In a video posted to X, Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said, History is not DEI

So what is? What exactly constitutes a diversity, equity, and inclusion-related post, article, thought, or idea

It would seem to me if we can't clearly define it, we shouldn't be giving orders to scrub it

For senior producer Brett Baker, video editor Brian Spencer, and graphics artist Dakota Patio

I'm Ryan Robertson, Straight Arrow News, signing off