Ryan L. Garcia

Iran threatens to cut undersea internet cables to Persian Gulf states if they continue hosting US military. - Cables via Strait of Hormuz and Red Sea carry 17% of global traffic - including to UAE/Saudi AI hubs - potentially causing months-long outages.

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Exactly! Software built internally. This is the way. And if your org doesn’t have the skills, you can find the skills at smaller companies.

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🇩🇪🇮🇱 Germany signed a $2.3-billion deal to purchase Israel’s Spike anti-tank missiles through the NATO Support and Procurement Agency (NSPA). Alongside the missile supply, the agreement reportedly covers maintenance, training, technical support, system integration, and related documentation. The contract was signed with EuroSpike, a European joint venture based in Bavaria and led by Tel Aviv’s Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, with German companies Rheinmetall and Diehl Defence holding an 80 percent stake. 💡 Most of the Spike missile’s production occurs in Europe, allowing Rafael to avoid some restrictions on selling Israeli-made armaments.

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🔥 𝗨𝗣𝗗𝗔𝗧𝗘: Booz Allen Ventures to Invest $200 Million in Defense Tech Startups Booz Allen Hamilton Holding Corp. is committing $200 million to its venture capital arm, deepening its work with defense tech startups working on drones, artificial intelligence and other tools. 🔗 [𝗙𝘂𝗹𝗹 𝗦𝘁𝗼𝗿𝘆](https://lnkd.in/g5_hPvZp) 📢 𝗙𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝗕𝗹𝗼𝗼𝗺𝗯𝗲𝗿𝗴

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From Shock & Awe to a Spider’s Web: The Rise of Integrated Decision-Driven ISR In 2003, the world watched as the U.S. launched “Shock and Awe” over Baghdad—1,700 precision strikes in a single night designed to paralyze Iraq’s leadership and force a rapid collapse. It was kinetic dominance, meticulously pre-planned and enabled by ISR, but still heavily dependent on volume and centralized control. Fast forward to 2025, and Ukraine’s Operation Spider’s Web turns that model on its head. No jets. No stealth bombers. Just 117 FPV drones, launched covertly from inside Russia, guided via LTE networks, and each one hitting a specific aircraft on the ground. Both operations sought the same triad of effects: • Cognitive: Disorient the enemy decision-maker • Physical: Destroy key capabilities • Informational: Shape the narrative and perception But the how has evolved dramatically. Five Conflicts That Transformed ISR Between these bookends, we’ve seen a progression: • Libya (2011): Precision over presence, dynamic targeting with multinational ISR • Syria (2015–2020): Russian fusion of mass firepower with real-time drone feeds • Nagorno-Karabakh (2020): Drone-led destruction of conventional forces in real-time • Op Spider’s Web (2025): Intelligence-triggered strategic strike without a single aircraft crossing a border Each step brought ISR closer to the heart of the decision, not just collection. The key difference? These operations weren’t driven by collection priorities. They were driven by decision requirements. ⸻ From Intel Support to Decision Orchestration This is the shift. ISR is no longer a support function—it’s an orchestrated system of understanding, designed to solve decisions across strategic, operational, and tactical levels. Op Spider’s Web wasn’t about gathering more data. It was about identifying which decisions needed to be made, and then using ISR to drive a plan that achieved physical, cognitive, and information overmatch. This is Integrated Decision-Driven ISR (IDDI): • The Fusion Centre becomes the engine room of operations • Decision-makers articulate their understanding needs • The ISR system reverse-engineers from effect → decision → intel → data → collection It’s not a revolution in technology—it’s a revolution in thinking Why This Matters In future conflict, tempo and understanding will define lethality, not just firepower. Shock & Awe taught us how to strike fast. Spider’s Web showed us how to strike smart. What connects them is the ISR system. What separates them is whether it was driven by data or driven by decisions. The next leap in capability won’t come from a new drone or sensor. It will come from redesigning ISR as an integrated, decision-first ecosystem. Let’s build it. #ISR #IDDI #DecisionDrivenISR #MilitaryInnovation #Targeting #FusionCentre #MultiDomainOps

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Why Tech’s Biggest Failures Become Billion-Dollar Success Stories In 2009, a bespectacled Microsoft executive stood on stage and introduced #Bing. His pitch was bold: search engines were broken, and Bing would fix them. Billions of dollars later, Bing captured only a sliver of the market. By most measures, it was a spectacular flop. That executive’s name? Satya Nadella. Today he is the CEO of Microsoft, a company worth $3.7 trillion, with #Azure Cloud as its crown jewel. The irony is striking: the man once associated with failure now leads one of the most valuable businesses in history. But Nadella’s story is not unique. In fact, it reflects a deeper truth about technology: "Failure often precedes fortune". Amazon once bet heavily on a smartphone called the #FirePhone. It was dead on arrival, costing the company nearly $200 million in losses. Yet the same voice-control technology that failed in phones became the backbone of #Alexa and #Echo. Today, those devices sit in over 600 million homes. Google, too, launched its ill-fated social network, #Google+. Users never showed up. The project was eventually shuttered. But the imaging and sharing tools developed for Google+ quietly evolved into Google Photos, now a billion-user success. Time and again, we see the same pattern: the ashes of failure fertilize the soil for the next breakthrough. Why does this happen? Because genuine innovation is experimental by nature. Experiments rarely succeed the first time. Jeff Bezos once said, “If you know it’s going to work, it’s not an experiment.” The uncomfortable truth is that most experiments fail but within them lie the seeds of unexpected victories. #Alphabet’s stumble after the release of ChatGPT in 2022 is another example. For a moment, it looked like Google had lost its footing. But within months, they answered with #Gemini 2.5 Flash Image, attracting hundreds of millions of users. What began as a public embarrassment became the trigger for reinvention. Clayton Christensen, in The Innovator’s Dilemma, argued that established companies often fail because they refuse to disrupt themselves. That is why Amazon, Google, and Microsoft invest in “failure labs” #skunkworks divisions free to experiment, fail, and learn outside the pressure of quarterly earnings. The irony is that what looks like reckless spending—billions lost on Fire Phone or Bing—often becomes the foundation of trillion-dollar empires. So what can we take away from these stories? First, failure is not final. It is tuition paid for future success. Second, leaders who embrace candor about failure, like Nadella, build credibility and resilience. Third, companies that structure failure into their culture are more likely to unlock the next big thing. And finally, patience is everything. Markets punish failure quickly. But over time, those same failures can create extraordinary value. #FromFailureToSuccess #DisruptiveInnovation #Entrepreneurship #ProductInnovation #AI #FutureOfTech

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We at REDSALT DEFENSE partner with the truly exceptional. Andy Yakulis and the team at Vector represent the highest standard of American defense innovation, not only because of the technology itself, but because it is driven by leaders forged in real-world operations, shaped by service, and grounded in the responsibility of defending our nation. Vector’s systems redefine Defense-as-a-Service, combining battlefield-proven performance with the agility and speed that define American innovation at its best. We’re grateful to our VC partners at Dauntless Ventures, also the best-of-the-best backed by the United States Department of War, for the introduction and for backing companies of this caliber. This is the high standard of partnership REDSALT DEFENSE is proud to advance in the Kingdom, anchored in operational excellence, proven capability, and alignment with the Kingdom’s #Vision2030 defense and localization objectives. Brad Gandy Matt Piosa Pete Koziol Mike Ferrari 🇺🇸 🇸🇦

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Iran Expo's 'Humanoid Robots' Revealed as Costumed Performers at a cybersecurity booth at the late November expo on Kish Island, which spotlights investment, fintech, and economic partnerships amid sanctions.

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This standoff between Anthropic and the United States Department of Defense is bigger than one contract. As AI capability rises exponentially, trust in institutions is fracturing across many democracies. In environments shaped by increasingly autocratic leadership and rising civil unrest, the temptation to prioritise orchestration over oversight will grow. That is the governance dilemma of our time. Product and platform organisations, especially those influencing national policy, must step up as true thought leaders in Responsible AI. Human-in-the-Loop cannot be optional. It must be non-negotiable. Orchestration must never supersede human judgement, accountability, and ethical review. If we get this wrong, we will not just scale intelligence. We will scale instability. To the global forums and coalitions that bring together companies and countries to shape a more inclusive future…will you lead in hard-coding governance, accountability, and Human-in-the-Loop as foundational design principles before capability outpaces control? #ResponsibleAI #AIGovernance #HumanInTheLoop #AIEthics #DigitalTrust #PublicPolicy #GlobalLeadership #TechnologyGovernance #FutureOfAI #InclusiveInnovation

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