El Segundo is different. Unlike most American cities, the big buildings don't have finance or software company names on top. Instead the corporate logos of Raytheon, Lockheed, and Boeing loom over this sun-bleached refinery town just south of LAX.

Nathan Mintz's office, on the other hand, is the bottom floor of a non-descript building. He greets me in jeans and flip-flops saying: "It's a great day to be in defense."

Mintz has been building American defense tech for over 20 years. First he worked 14 years at Boeing and Raytheon - or "the big Soviet tracker factories," as he calls them. In 2018 he left to co-found Epirus, which makes microwave weapons that take down drones. After building Epirus to a billion dollar "unicorn," he launched Spartan, designing software to sharpen the vision of automotive radar systems.

Now Mintz is back with his third venture, CX2 Industries, to solve an urgent problem. "America has a reputation as a global innovator, yet we trail in the dark arts of electronic warfare," Nathan says. Not good. Electronic warfare may well decide the Ukraine war, and future wars.

CX2's office was empty the day I visited. Just Nathan and his head of growth, Scott Zolendziewski, were there. Scott's a former Green Beret whose quiet intensity complements Mintz's direct but laid-back energy. The rest of the team were in Idaho, testing drone technologies.

As they showed me around, we turned a corner to a room with black harnesses hanging from a high ceiling. "Welcome to the bondage chamber," Mintz joked. It was a testing room for drones.

The whole office looked more like a workshop. Three 3D printers hummed as they created custom parts. A 10-foot-tall American flag covered one wall. Next to it was a markerboard with the message "CX2 WILL succeed!"

Nate calls me over to what looks like a wooden shipping container. The inside is lined with jagged blue acoustic foam. It's an anechoic chamber built to absorb electromagnetic waves.

"They quoted us $300,000 and three months to build this," he says, swinging open the DIY door. "We built it ourselves for about $10,000 in three weeks."

In Nathan's office, he pulls up a PowerPoint presentation he created about the bloat and stagnation in America's defense industry. The slides laid bare a broken system where the five "primes"-Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman-capture over 80% of defense dollars.

Worse, many of these dollars flow to the primes on cost-plus contracts, where the prime is guaranteed to recoup its costs plus a fixed fee or percentage. This disincentivizes efficiency, speed, and innovation, while incentivizing cost-overruns.

***

Nathan founded CX2 after getting a call from a friend. Porter Smith, soon to be cofounder of CX2, had been on the front lines in Ukraine, and was alarmed by the revolution happening in drone warfare. Nathan then visited Ukraine to see it for himself.

Nathan hands me a drone system CX2 is building. I'm struck by its lightweight. It feels like a plastic toy that might snap in a strong breeze. Hard to believe these flimsy contraptions are redrawing the rules of modern combat.

Erik Prince, founder of private defense firm Blackwater, told me drones are "the biggest disruption to warfare since Genghis Khan put stirrups on horses." DIY drones now inflict about 70% of all casualties in Ukraine. Drones destroy more armored vehicles in Ukraine than all traditional weapons combined. Ukrainian soldiers duct-tape grenades to cheap quadcopters that streak across enemy lines to destroy tanks worth 50,000 times more.

"Drones are fundamentally an offensive weapon," Scott tells me. Nathan adds: "the same precision strike capabilities only great nation states could afford to build are now available to any hobbyist—or terrorist-with an Amazon account."

That asymmetry is a problem for America's long-dominant military. Nathan considers Martin Gurri's 2014 book The Revolt of the Public "the most important book so far in the 21st century." Required reading among tech elites like Marc Andreessen, Gurri's book explains how the digital revolution shattered elite authority and disrupted top-down, centralized, well-funded incumbents in media, politics, and business.

And now, war. Ukraine leaves no question that conventional military power is going obsolete. America shipped 31 Abrams tanks to Ukraine, costing $10 million each. 19 have been destroyed or disabled - many taken out by drones costing less than a high-end smartphone. The remaining tanks were pulled off the front lines.

"In Ukraine we're launching $6 million missiles to take out $20,000 drones," Nathan adds. "1954 called and they want their solution back. CX2 exists to bring us back to cost parity."

The US military remains stuck building big, expensive, exquisite weapons systems. Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carriers cost $13 billion each, after $37 billion in R&D. The Navy produces about one every five years.

Imagine that carrier facing a swarm of 1,000 cheap grenade-laden drones. There's only one winner. Nathan quotes Stalin: "Quantity has a quality all of its own."

***

For all the havoc they wreak, drones are useless if they cannot be controlled.

"Neither guns nor ammunition are of much use in modern warfare unless there is sufficient petrol to haul them around" said German field marshal Erwin Rommel during WWIl. Connectivity is the new fuel.

Imagine a battlefield where the air is weaponized. Invisible electronic tendrils strangle communications. Radio waves become tripwires. Signal jammers lead drones and missiles astray. This is modern electronic warfare (EW).

"Early in the war soldiers on both sides posted TikTok videos from the front lines. They learned that was a bad idea fast. The enemy pinpointed their locations from those transmissions. Most of them are dead now," Nathan tells me.

EW is the new source of battlefield "alpha." He who controls the electromagnetic spectrum controls the war. Just look at the game of cat and mouse unfolding in Ukraine.

In the early days of the war, Ukraine's drones cut right through Russia's unprepared defenses. Ukrainian forces enjoyed a honeymoon period with their self-detonating drones, using them as homemade precision missiles.

But Russia quickly adapted, deploying thousands of jammers. These systems create bubbles that sever drone video feeds, block GPS, and disrupt communications. The battlefield is now an electromagnetic duel, machines fighting machines for control of the invisible spectrum.

The US's largest drone maker Skydio sent hundreds of advanced drones to Ukraine. Many flew off course or dropped from the sky, victims of Russian jamming. Expensive American precision munitions, reliant on GPS, began missing targets at alarming rates.

Scott describes the battle of rapid iteration happening in Ukraine. One side innovates a new frequency-hopping technique or jammer. The other side deciphers and counters it. "The OODA loop-Observe, Orient, Decide, Act, the bedrock of US tactical thinking—is under 30 days in Ukraine," Scott says. Meanwhile, America's traditional weapons procurement cycles operate in years. Sometimes decades.

Nathan adds: "Drones in Ukraine get over-the-air software updates roughly six times per day. This allows Ukraine to vaccinate whole fleets of drones against specific attacks nearly instantly."

Contrast this with a US Defense Department program launched in 2020 to help startups sell drones to the military. The program doesn't allow drone makers to update their software without government approval. That process that can take months.

"You know why we're behind in drones?" Nathan says. "Because the FAA required a pilot's license to fly one beyond line of sight. Meanwhile, China labeled theirs as toys, letting their companies iterate rapidly. The biggest barrier to winning is our own bureaucracy."

CX2 is building specialized drones and systems to dominate electronic warfare. Nathan lays out its "Find, Fix, Finish" strategy. First drones scan the battlefield for enemy signals. Then, different drones pinpoint and eliminate the source. "We're building night vision goggles for the battlefield. If an enemy system emits a signal, it dies," Nathan says.

CX2's three initial products form an "attack stack," all named after weapons from the video game Halo - a nod to Nathan's gaming youth and the futuristic nature of modern war.

Wraith is the reconnaissance drone. It can loiter in the air for 40 minutes, hunting for enemy signals. The entire drone body serves as a sensor, creating heat maps of radio signals across the battlefield.

Banshee is the strike drone. Once Wraith finds an enemy signal source, Banshee can autonomously track and destroy it.

Vadris is a small sensor package Nathan describes as looking like a "Chinese food box." It bolts onto existing drones, allowing pilots to "see" radio emissions. It adds visual indicators that appear on screen, guiding them toward enemy systems like jammers.

While conventional drones go dark when jammed, CX2's platforms use Al and onboard processing to continue their mission even when cut off from operators and GPS.

Nathan explains we're still in the "1v1" era of drone warfare. One soldier commands one drone. But soon, swarms of drones will be controlled by a single operator.

"That presents a whole new set of challenges. We're developing systems that can trace their point of origin. We're focused on shooting the archer, not the arrows," Nathan says.

He continues: "our vision is to give America an invisible electronic wall that we can push forward and pull back as needed, to dominate the spectrum."

***

El Segundo is ground zero for America's "defense" renaissance. Within a few square miles startups are crafting hypersonic missiles (Castelion), designing high-performance war drones (Neros) and building the tools to re-industrialize America (Hadrian).

The raw, unapologetic "we can just build it" conviction here is infectious. Dozens of defense tech startups here are charging forward. They mostly occupy converted garages or street-level warehouses, a contrast to the primes that still dominate Gundo's skyline, for now.

Sitting in Nathan's office, I pose Peter Thiel's famous question: "What important truth do very few people agree with you on?"

Nate answers "There is good and evil in the world."

Scott follows instantly, "And America is the greatest country on earth."

This moral clarity is common Gundo. A massive American flag hangs on the wall of every startup. There's an unapologetic belief that technology should serve national interests as well as commercial ones.

How did this 5.5-square-mile town of 17,000 become the epicenter of America's defense tech resurgence? Gundo and the surrounding area has been an aerospace hub since Howard Hughes and John Northrop built planes here. Four of the five defense primes still maintain a significant presence. Aerospace startups here are as common as coffee shops elsewhere.

Like Silicon Valley for software, South Bay attracts talent that sticks around, learns from each other, and starts new businesses. Southern California is the deepest pool of aerospace talent in America, and probably the world. There's a deep reservoir of knowledge and experience to build on.

Isaiah Taylor, the 24-year-old founder of Valar Atomics, told me a story that illustrates Gundo's unique ecosystem. Faulty parts for his prototype nuclear reactor arrived from Texas. Frustrated, he asked for help on X. Within two days, a local fabricator made the precise components he needed. "Where else on Earth does that happen?" he asked.

The true BC/AD moment for South LA's hard tech scene was SpaceX establishing its headquarters in nearby Hawthorne. From a handful of engineers in 2004, SpaceX now employs over 10,000 locally. More importantly, it created the "School of Elon Musk." Thousands graduated, imbued with a culture of rapid iteration and the motivation to achieve difficult goals.

The PayPal Mafia (Musk, Thiel, Levchin, Sacks) went on to build companies like Tesla, SpaceX, Linkedin, Palantir, and Affirm. These ventures generated trillions of dollars in wealth for everyone involved.

The group to watch now is the SpaceX Mafia. SpaceX is valued around $350 billion today. The ventures its alumni create, focused on atoms, energy, defense, and space, will dwarf that figure. SpaceX alumni are everywhere in Gundo.

I had spent the previous two days in San Francisco meeting with founders. Nobody in SF says hi. Everyone in Gundo is willing to chat. Gundo also gives better handshakes.

It's also intensely serious. Visiting companies requires navigating a NDAs and passport checks. Many buildings operate under ITAR (International Traffic in Arms Regulations) restrictions. I was politely asked to leave one facility due to my Irish citizenship.

***

Back in Nathan's office, he crystalizes the stakes.

"If, ten years from now, at least one or two of the big defense primes haven't been fundamentally disrupted, America is in serious trouble. The primes have been sucked dry of A-players. They left long ago for places where they could actually build things."

He says this not with startup bravado, but with the conviction of someone who spent 14 years designing EW systems for F-15s and F-18s at the primes. He's seen the sclerosis from the inside. The prime model has enriched executives and shareholders at the expense of America's defense industrial base.

Nathan sees parallels to the broader US. "What killed American manufacturing was the McKinsey model," Nathan asserts. "It hollowed out America. We design stuff here, but make nothing. For a while, it looked great on paper. We got cheap Chinese gadgets while they handled the dirty work of building stuff. Then China woke up and realized they could design stuff too."

America's outsourcing of building stuff has created a lot of billionaires, but left the country vulnerable. "I'm in a breakfast group with a few of these billionaires," he says. "To be clear, l'm not a billionaire."

I ask if he would have founded CX2 if he were a billionaire. He shrugs. "Probably. I need something to do."

I press a little more, to get past his nonchalance about his mission that feels existential to America's dominance. "So why'd you decide to launch a 3' startup? Do you see opportunities others miss? Do you just like pain?"

Nathan leans back in his desk chair, which is surrounded by a dozen or so pictures of his 4 young kids and wife. "You know the story of the man who plants trees whose shade he will never sit in? That's it."

As I walk out of CX2's office, I feel I've glimpsed America's industrial future. America needs this disruption. We must get back to building great stuff quickly, in defense tech and elsewhere, to stay #1.

A new generation of entrepreneurs are rising to the challenge. If they succeed, if Nathan succeeds, it won't just create profitable companies. It will mean America relearned how to build, how to innovate, how to win the invisible battles that will decide the future. That's worth more than all the unicorns in Silicon Valley.