Rob Lehman: Reflections on the Saronic-Powered Rescue Mission in the Strait of Hormuz

In early June, a pair of U.S. pilots flying an Apache helicopter were downed in the Strait of Hormuz. Faced with a sending more service members into the perilous body of water near Iran, the U.S. Navy decided to send an unmanned Saronic Corsair drone to rescue the pilots, and did so successfully. The first-of-its-kind rescue mission is emblematic of the shifting nature of conflict where unmanned autonomous systems — in the sea, on land and in the sky — are playing vital roles in defense operations. Rob Lehman, chief operating officer and co-founder of Saronic, joins CTRL + ALT + DEFENSE to give a firsthand look into the unclassified side of the operation, his thoughts on the changing nature of warfare driven by drones and how the defense industrial base is evolving to meet the needs of the modern battlefield.

Also in this episode: SAP NS2 CIO Nick Totten explains why defense agencies and contractors should leverage pre-accredited cloud platforms to move faster on modernization and AI adoption. Totten says that inheriting established security controls can help organizations avoid months of compliance work, reduce the burden of Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification readiness and free up resources for mission-focused innovation. He also discusses why cloud migration must go beyond “lift and shift,” how modern ERP and SaaS environments can create new operational capabilities and why AI tools must work inside tightly controlled, secure environments. This segment was sponsored by SAP NS2.