Electrons are the new bullets

The world’s first power prime

In today’s Diary:

• 1 coffee pot vs. a whole Army base

• The world’s most dangerous gas station

• A WWII secret still winning wars

• The battery company that loves diesel

• From 90s miracle crystal to Tesla breakthrough

Hey Rational Optimist,

Energy is the master resource, the bedrock civilization is built on.

There's no such thing as a rich, low-energy country. And there never will be. I'll never miss a chance to share my favorite chart: 

The same rule applies to the battlefield. There's no such thing as a winning, low-energy army.  Every historic shift in war was really a shift in energy.

For thousands of years the horse dominated. Sails allowed empires to reach across oceans. Coal gave rise to the steamship. Oil industrialized war and gave us tanks and fighter jets. Then the atom birthed aircraft carriers that refuel about once every 25 years.

One founder I met is betting that electrons are the next leap forward.

Whoever masters the new power source first, wins.

Right now the US military is adopting drones, jammers and lasers as fast as it can. They all use huge amounts of electricity. But the Army still makes electricity the way it did in Vietnam: haul in diesel and fire up a generator.

Last month I drove to a warehouse near San Francisco airport to meet Chariot Defense founder Adam Warmoth.

While running counter-drone programs at Anduril, Adam saw soldiers do something as benign as plug in a coffee pot… and it’d take down the whole base’s radar!

Adam did the most rational optimist thing possible: start a company to solve the military’s power problem.

An Army base is basically a small city. Normal cities can plug into a grid. But there are no sockets on the battlefield. So military outposts must make their own electricity using dirty diesel generators.

Camp Leatherneck in Afghanistan burned 15,000 gallons of diesel a day just to keep the lights on.

Seventy out of every 100 tons shipped into a war zone is fuel and water. Every ounce arrives by convoy. And convoys are targets.

The Atlantic Council counts 3,000+ troops killed or wounded protecting convoys from 2003 to 2009.

We’ve lost more than one American on average a day for 7 years… just guarding fuel.

If you thought running fuel to big fortified bases was dangerous, try trucking it to four soldiers hiding in a tree line who move position every day. That’s the state of play in Ukraine.

America is building the most electrified fighting force in history with drones, jammers, lasers and battlefield AI. The way these systems draw energy is spiky. A laser draws enormous power for three seconds and then nothing. Six drones land at once and all need to be rapidly charged.

Today’s military generators can’t handle these sudden bursts.

This is the mismatch Adam drew for me on a whiteboard in his San Bruno HQ. That dotted line is steady generator power. Every peak above that line means lights out:

Soldiers are forced to lug around 20lbs+ of spare batteries each.

Adam told me the armed forces are so desperate for portable power, they buy Chinese power banks at Home Depot. Sometimes they’ll run trucks idle under camo nets to charge gear, risking carbon monoxide poisoning. An 8-ton truck to push a phone charger's worth of electricity into a drone battery!

This is the gap Adam left Anduril to fix. And the biggest breakthroughs in war rarely look like weapons. They look like plain boxes.

In WWII, the Germans invented a fuel can to move gas easily:

It was much better than anything the Allies had. So an American engineer smuggled a “jerrycan” out of Germany, which we then copied and produced en masse.

As FDR said: “Without these cans it would have been impossible for our armies to cut their way across France.”

Chariot's Amphora is the jerrycan of the electric war.

This unglamorous box is one of the most important things being built in America right now:

Amphora 24 (shown above) is the size of a Pelican case, and two soldiers can carry it. Adam told me brigade commanders are already ditching the Chinese power banks from Home Depot and swapping them for Chariot units.

Its big brother, Amphora 400, rides on any standard trailer and can power lasers, high-power microwave weapons and even whole field hospitals.

Like the jerrycan, portability and convenience win. Amphora plugs into the NATO port that already exists on every Army vehicle. And it charges both ways: sipping power from the truck while the engine runs, feeding it back when the engine’s off.

Now consider: America and its allies field roughly 1 million ground vehicles. More than 99% of them carry a lead-acid battery whose only job is starting the engine. Chariot’s unglamorous box turns every one of those vehicles into a rolling power plant.

Amphora charges slowly at the rate of a diesel engine and delivers power violently when needed. Think of it as a Tesla Powerwall for the battlefield. Adam described it as “A power lake. You put any power in, and you can pull any power out."

And unlike a generator, Amphora doesn't roar and give away your position. It sits there in silence so there’s nothing for a hunter drone's thermal camera to find.

Adam describes Chariot as…

“The most diesel-loving battery company in America…”

Many folks hear "startup putting batteries in the military" and assume this is a San Francisco crusade to decarbonize the Army and turn tanks into Priuses.

Amphora doesn't work without diesel, and Adam isn’t trying to turn the Army “green.”

Today a generator has two jobs. It must make electricity and deliver it the second something demands it. It's good at the first and terrible at the second.

Amphora splits the workload. The generator does what its good at: making electricity. The battery handles power delivery so a soldier wanting a hit of caffeine doesn’t take down the base.

Adam said: "We're focused on batteries as power, not batteries as energy. It's using generators for what they're good at, and batteries for what they're good at."

The underlying idea here is energy and power aren’t the same. Energy is how much you've got. Power is how fast you can use it. Adam sketched out the growing gap for me on his whiteboard:

Chariot snaps those alligator jaws shut. The weapons this unlocks are already live.

“Electrons are the new bullets…”

Amphoras have powered lasers that shot drones out of the sky. A laser weapon built by Aurelius Systems was sitting on a hilltop firing range, being fed by three large diesel generators. Chariot pulled up in a pickup truck with its advanced high-voltage battery system and disconnected all three generators.

Aurelius’s “Archimedes” laser then shot quadcopters out of the sky at 50 and 110 meters. The Navy said Chariot's box was smaller, quieter and lighter than any one of the generators it replaced, and that after the shoot it still had capacity for more than 1,000 rounds.

I’m a big fan of Aurelius and chatted with founder Michael LaFramboise on the ROS (which we’ve since renamed Optimists Make Money) podcast here.

How many shots a laser can take is determined by its power supply. Aurelius founder Michael calls Chariot’s Amphora system "our magazine."

Chariot participated in over 60 field tests. The very first Amphora Chariot built is still in Alaska. The soldiers who tested it, in Adam’s words, “wouldn’t let us take it home after the demo.” If that’s not a sign of a good product I don’t know what is!

Walk inside Chariot’s San Bruno factory…

And you see Pelican cases scattered everywhere in various states of assembly.

When I visited in July Adam demoed Amphora A24 and then showed its big brother Amphora 400. What struck me was it’s 1/3^rd the size of the diesel generator it replaces… yet delivers bigger bursts of power than the generator ever could.

“It’s 800 lbs. versus a 2,300 lbs. generator” Adam said.

I rarely feel small standing next to a founder. But Adam is 6'4" and spent five years on Stanford's varsity water polo team:

Chariot is shipping dozens of Amphoras to customers each month. They could go faster but are deliberately throttling volumes while the software matures. Adam believes the software is the real magic.

Hardware gets copied. What can't be reverse engineered is a fleet of deployed systems constantly feeding data back to improve the system.

Its Chariot OS software turns a normal battery into a self-improving system. It learns what the base needs, decides what gets power and when, and sheds load before the system crashes.

Adam's analogy is the Tesla trip planner. You don't have to figure out where to charge, the car does it for you. Chariot OS tells the soldier what to plug in, in what order, and what he can afford to run. His design goal, in his own word: "soldier-proof."

This makes Chariot a Silicon Industrial: a business that makes physical things but whose nervous system runs on software. Think of how your phone updates and wakes up with new abilities. Chariot's box does the same.

Cutting edge doesn’t always mean brand new.

Dig deeper and you usually find something that was invented long ago, tried, failed, and left on a shelf for years. Silicon carbide, the crystal at the heart of Chariot's box, is the best example I know.

Everything electric runs on tiny gates (switches) that flip power on and off thousands of times a second. For 70 years those switches were made of plain silicon, which overheats and dies when pushed too hard.

Silicon carbide survives 10X the voltage, switches 100X faster, and sheds far less heat.

In the 1990s the Pentagon wanted faster radar and smaller communications gear. It found a tiny North Carolina startup growing silicon carbide crystals that promised exactly that. Problem was… growing the crystals takes weeks in a furnace above 2,000°C, which made them insanely expensive.

So the miracle crystal sat on the shelf… until Tesla came along.

The Model 3 needed every mile of range it could get and in 2018 became the first car to run on silicon carbide switches. Every carmaker copied it, thus dragging the price of silicon carbide down from luxury to commodity.

The EV boom handed Chariot a second gift: cheap high-voltage batteries. All the key parts of Chariot's system cost about 1% of what they did in 1990:

The battery cells alone inside one Amphora 400 would have cost roughly $138,000 in 1991. Today: about $1,200.

In Adam's words: "We get to ride the innovation wave for free."

The defense industry organizes itself around primes, one company that owns a whole category. Lockheed owns fighter jets. Huntington Ingalls owns ships.

Today there is no power prime. Adam is building the first.

I love platform companies, whose product makes everyone else's products work. All the “sexy” weapons everyone is excited about… drones, autonomy, electronic warfare… are machines for turning electricity into an effect.

Every one of those systems runs on the same electrons. Chariot is the picks and shovels of the defense tech gold rush.

I’m often asked why I champion defense tech. Because to be free, we must be strong.

And the market for these solutions is much bigger than the military alone.

The battlefield perfects tech the rest of the world adopts.

ARPANET became the internet. GPS became the blue dot on your maps app.

Ian Cinnamon, founder of Apex Space, taught me an important lesson about dual use. "You can't build one version for the Army and a different one for civilians." It must be the same product.

Chariot passes that test. The same box that powers a military base can buffer an EV fast-charger or help a construction site running on a generator. Defense is just the customer who pays first.

Data centers likely aren’t far behind. Inside AI clusters you have 100,000+ chips all working in sync, with power demands swinging wildly minute to minute… on a grid built for steady loads.

Chariot's “addressable market” is everyone with a plug. Today its boxes allow lasers to shoot drones out of the sky. Tomorrow they will stand between data centers and the grid, catching surges that would otherwise brown out a city.

The most sophisticated military is trying to fight an electric war on a power system built for radios and lightbulbs. Meanwhile ragtag rebels can build a drone army in their shacks to attack oil refineries and tankers.

Cheap defensive power flips that math back.

Somebody is going to solve the military’s power problem… and make billions of dollars doing it.

My bet is on Chariot Defense.

Right now US soldiers are using Chinese battery packs from Home Depot to power American weapons. Chariot is building the alternative.

—Stephen McBride