Sep 14, 2026 · 50 min · 19 segments
Have you ever thought about how you update your F-22? Probably not, but someone has to. Rob Slaughter, former Air Force officer and co-founder of Defense Unicorns, joins the Fighter Pilot Podcast to…
Rob SlaughterGuestTucker HamiltonHostWell, you know, this is why we may have some listeners right now scratching their head being like, "Well, why is this guy on the Fighter Pilot podcast?" The reality is our systems are driven by software.
One of, uh, one of my co-founders, original engineer on Kessel Run, a lot of our early employees are Kessel Run and other software factories like Platform One and, and Space Camp, which are two organizations that I started, you know, while still on active duty.
So Kessel Run, I mean, it was this innovative idea concept where you unleashed our software engineers, our computer programmers, to just solve problems, and they weren't gonna have to worry about the most recent firmware.
They were gonna have the most up-to-date computers that weren't bogged down by the Air Force large computer frame system, and they were gonna be cut loose, and it was successful, and they were running along, and I feel like they were solving problems.
We need to now adopt them and bring them under the fold of the regular Air Force stuff." And I think, and I don't wanna be too down on them now.
I have-- I, I'm, I'm not familiar enough with what they're delivering, but I feel like it just bogged down.
Kessel Run was made because the Air Force needed something outside, but now it was like trying to e-embrace it and bring it in, and they s- I feel like they kind of squashed it, right? Like, they squashed this ability to go fast, and they made it more bureaucratic and bogged down what was supposed to be individuals running free.
With scale comes some form of structure, and they, they lost the small team mindset.
So, like, a, a good example and one of the stories of Kessel Run is they helped develop, and probably even so this day, their most famous application is a tanker planner tool.
And so originally, down in the Middle East, they were trying to figure out, "How do we get all these tankers in all these locations and all these schedules?" And they were quite literally using a whiteboard to where they were, like, you know, drawing things on the whiteboard, sketching out times, and then they would do this, you know, on a repeat pattern.
If there was any changes into operational plan, they'd have to go back to the, the whiteboard to make some changes.
So the initial application that they developed, tanker planner tool, literally helped save objectively millions of dollars a day because they actually got to send a tanker home.
They actually got to send, you know, not, not just the tanker, but also some of the personnel home down at some of the peak time periods in the Middle East.
Well, you know, this is why we may have some listeners right now scratching their head being like, "Well, why is this guy on the Fighter Pilot podcast?" The reality is our systems are driven by software.
One of, uh, one of my co-founders, original engineer on Kessel Run, a lot of our early employees are Kessel Run and other software factories like Platform One and, and Space Camp, which are two organizations that I started, you know, while still on active duty.
So Kessel Run, I mean, it was this innovative idea concept where you unleashed our software engineers, our computer programmers, to just solve problems, and they weren't gonna have to worry about the most recent firmware.
They were gonna have the most up-to-date computers that weren't bogged down by the Air Force large computer frame system, and they were gonna be cut loose, and it was successful, and they were running along, and I feel like they were solving problems.
We need to now adopt them and bring them under the fold of the regular Air Force stuff." And I think, and I don't wanna be too down on them now.
I have-- I, I'm, I'm not familiar enough with what they're delivering, but I feel like it just bogged down.
Kessel Run was made because the Air Force needed something outside, but now it was like trying to e-embrace it and bring it in, and they s- I feel like they kind of squashed it, right? Like, they squashed this ability to go fast, and they made it more bureaucratic and bogged down what was supposed to be individuals running free.
With scale comes some form of structure, and they, they lost the small team mindset.
So, like, a, a good example and one of the stories of Kessel Run is they helped develop, and probably even so this day, their most famous application is a tanker planner tool.
And so originally, down in the Middle East, they were trying to figure out, "How do we get all these tankers in all these locations and all these schedules?" And they were quite literally using a whiteboard to where they were, like, you know, drawing things on the whiteboard, sketching out times, and then they would do this, you know, on a repeat pattern.
If there was any changes into operational plan, they'd have to go back to the, the whiteboard to make some changes.
So the initial application that they developed, tanker planner tool, literally helped save objectively millions of dollars a day because they actually got to send a tanker home.
They actually got to send, you know, not, not just the tanker, but also some of the personnel home down at some of the peak time periods in the Middle East.
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