Post by Tabitha Kinchen

Yesterday I had the opportunity to moderate “Powering the Fight” at the Tectonic Defense Summit in Austin, Texas. Energy often sits in the background of defense discussions, but it’s quickly becoming one of the hard constraints on modern capabilities. As the force becomes more distributed and increasingly reliant on autonomous systems, sensors, and compute at the edge, power is becoming a limiting factor for operational capability. I was joined by three leaders tackling that challenge from different parts of the ecosystem: • Adam Warmoth  — Chariot Defense • Erin Price-Wright — Andreessen Horowitz • Jungwoo Lee  — South8 Technologies A few themes that came through clearly: Energy is an operational constraint. When power becomes scarce, it drives risk, limits mission flexibility, and creates new vulnerabilities in contested environments. Defense energy problems are not commercial energy problems. Reliability, safety, extreme temperatures, and mission assurance make battery innovation for defense fundamentally harder than building for consumer markets. Software-defined power will matter as much as chemistry. Smarter management of generation, storage, and distribution is becoming critical as systems scale. The Valley of Death is still real. Breakthrough technologies exist today, but transitioning them into programs of record or operational units remains one of the hardest problems in the ecosystem. As demand curves accelerate with AI-enabled systems, autonomous platforms, and swarming drones, the question of how we generate, store, and manage power at the tactical edge is becoming increasingly important. Great conversation and great audience. Thanks to Adam, Erin, and Jungwoo for bringing real operational, technical, and investment perspectives to the conversation, and to the Tectonic team for pulling together the community.