Subterranean Warfare: Can Pickaxe Mountain Be Destroyed?

DUBOWITZ: Yadin Soffer, welcome to The Iran Breakdown.

SOFFER: Thank you for having me. Happy to be here.

DUBOWITZ: It’s amazing for me to be here actually. I’m in your company. I think I’m sitting here on your assembly and production floor.

SOFFER: Yes.

DUBOWITZ: Which is really cool. So, Yadin, you’re CEO of Traysar and you are coming on the show at an amazing time in the series that we’ve been running because just last week we had an episode where I interviewed my colleague at FDD, Andrea Stricker, who’s a nuclear expert.

SOFFER: Yeah, I heard that one. Whole discussion.

DUBOWITZ: Yeah. I’m glad you heard it because it was all about Pickaxe Mountain and what we’re going to do about it. So, I’m going to talk about Pickaxe Mountain. I’m going to ask you a bunch of questions because I feel like I found the guy to solve the problem that is confounding many experts.

SOFFER: A guy who knows the guys maybe to solve the problem.

DUBOWITZ: The guy who knows the guys.

SOFFER: He’s all our team here.

DUBOWITZ: Excellent. But let’s start with your personal story. Who are you? You speak with an American accent. Are you an American, an Israeli, or both?

SOFFER: Both. Mostly. Born and raised in Israel. I moved to New York about eight years ago, spent a while there. And for the past year or so, I’ve been kind of all over. We have a new R&D facility in Austin. We’re opening up now our first site in Washington, D.C. And we have a site right here in Israel, a manufacturing facility.

DUBOWITZ: So great. I’m happy to hear you’re going to be my neighbor in Washington. So definitely have you guys over for dinner. And Austin, great town. Great Texas barbecue. I hope you enjoy Texas barbecue.

SOFFER: Hell yeah. I mean, it was new for me for the past year getting to know the local tech scene there. But man, it’s amazing what Austin has become. Yeah.

DUBOWITZ: The only problem now is I’m wearing cowboy boots and you’re not. So we’re going to get you cowboy boots for the follow-up episode.

SOFFER: I’m in Israel mode with the linen.

DUBOWITZ: Israel Casual. Absolutely. So tell us a little bit about your background and how you came to be the co-founder and CEO of this remarkable company.

SOFFER: Yeah. So I moved to New York to start a company called Xperiti, actually in the FinTech space. I come from a software engineering background, AI as we call it these days. Back then it was natural language processing. We were analyzing large quantities of voice data. We found our product market fit with hedge funds. The company was acquired in 2023 and a few months later, October 7th. And I think like a lot of Israelis in the US at the time, you kind of scrambled to find a way to do something about it. I wasn’t called back for reserves like a lot of my friends from New York were. So my reaction, my annoying reaction, was just to call all my friends eating shit in Gaza here and being like, “Hey man, can I help you somehow?” And everyone sort of threw out a lot of different things they needed around.

One interesting thing that came up a lot was contested logistics because everyone’s dealing with carrying a lot of weight for long periods of time. So started looking at like, can we do autonomous UGVs to follow them around? How can we help? Obviously everyone needed drones. There were a lot of different requests.

But one that really stayed with me was a conversation I had with Asher Katz, who’s my co-founder today. He is a founding member of a unit referred to as the lab here or the longer name, the Lab for Tunnel Detection. It was a unit founded in 2016 as a response to the terror tunnels crossing into the country. And they did a great job of identifying the tunnels and shutting them down. But Asher’s sort of request to me was, “look, man, if you can get me someone who built a TBM, a tunnel boring machine, that would be an interesting conversation.” So he sent me on this wild quest to find someone who knows something about call it mechanical engineering and tunnels. I got to a guy who spent most of his career at the boring company and then went on to SpaceX and got them in a room together.

And that was somehow the catalyst that turned into Traysar. And then along the way, I reached out to Gilad, who he’s the gray hair on our team, not really, but he built his career both in 8200, but then in Israel media. So he deals a lot with influence and lobby around the world. And I think that triangle between call it my technical background, Asher’s military professional background and Gilad’s call it sales, lobby, government background, really created what now really I appreciate as the dream team to take on a new category in, call it, the defense tech space.

DUBOWITZ: So talk about what hard problem you guys are trying to solve because it seems you’re really creating a new category of warfare or at least a new environment, but it’s actually a really old environment. In the history of warfare…

SOFFER: It’s the oldest.

DUBOWITZ: Right?

SOFFER: It’s arguably the oldest. It’s crazy. You look back at. There are tunnels in Jerusalem from thousands of years ago that were used as offensive tunnels. So it’s not new. It’s the oldest form of warfare, which is why it’s so baffling as to why is the technology and the oldest form of warfare the least developed. And so, when people ask us what we do at Traysar, I say, yes, obviously we’re developing the technology and the systems needed to, call it, win the underground war. But what I found myself doing, which is like, I would say a company priority is a lot on the communication side, on the government side, on talking to policymakers to make people understand what you’re an expert in essentially is how we win the next war. And the fact that underground takes a much bigger part in that than what I think people understand.

So, a lot of our job has been getting around the smart people who understand this and who know how to communicate this and have demonstrated this, whether it’s from the military or from the DoW and get them to say where the capability gaps are, why we aren’t hitting underground facilities, why we aren’t ending the war in Gaza, and how all of this sort of trails back and connects to this new domain, which we call “Subterra.”

DUBOWITZ: Right. So, I mean, huge amount of attention and massive resources over many, many decades in warfare in the air, land, sea, now in space, cyber domain. But again, subterranean warfare, the oldest warfare. And yet really probably the most perplexing today for the good guys is how do we actually fight subterranean warfare where our enemies are going deeper and deeper and deeper underground? And of course, I mean, Gaza was a case study in that. Hamas taking billions of dollars in foreign aid and not building shelters for its people, but building attack tunnels for terrorists. And then using those attack tunnels repeatedly over many years to launch offensive operations inside Israel. And then obviously the most egregious example of that was October 7th. Well, interesting, they didn’t even come underground. Yeah,

SOFFER: They didn’t. There was no penetration from underground. It was just like ramming through.

DUBOWITZ: Ramming Through the fence.

SOFFER: Yeah.

DUBOWITZ: But, then of course the war that ensued, they were fighting from underground and then using civilians as human shields. So certainly seen that in Gaza, Hezbollah and Lebanon probably even better at building even – It’s

SOFFER: Also a different type of terrain, different type of geology, makes it more difficult, even more difficult than in Gaza.

DUBOWITZ: Right. So rock, not sand.

SOFFER: Exactly. Yeah.

DUBOWITZ: I actually, I hadn’t mentioned to this before we started the podcast, but my most pronounced experience with tunnels was actually on the North Korean, South Korean border, the DMZ, where we went for a tour of the tunnels that the North Koreans had built under the border into South Korea that would have taken hundreds of thousands of troops and tanks. I mean, in these massive tunnels.

SOFFER: Yeah. I think I would say those tunnels. Do you know how they were built? I think they were likely built with tunnel boring machines. It’s not like your guy holding a jackhammer like you have in Gaza or in Lebanon.

DUBOWITZ: No doubt. I mean, these are massive tunnels that

SOFFER: Yeah

DUBOWITZ: Can literally move tanks, armored vehicles. And again, you could move divisions of troops under the border. So it’s pretty remarkable what the North Koreans have done. And of course, the North Koreans helped Hezbollah and Hezbollah helped Hamas. And so the bad guys have been helping each other.

SOFFER: By the way, also the cartels. Hezbollah has been helping the cartels. It’s a whole network.

DUBOWITZ: Yeah, say a few words about that. I think for Americans who are deeply concerned about our southern border, maybe some of them are not aware of what the cartels have done.

SOFFER: Yeah. Look, I think, well, at this point, it is a fact that there are tunnels going through the U.S. southern border to smuggle both drugs and for human trafficking. So, there was a tunnel identified just a few months ago between Tijuana and San Diego. So for a while it was maybe we have, maybe we don’t. Now, there are tunnels. They’re identified. There’s photos and videos of the tunnels being found. I think the question now is how many are there? And it’s a tough question. There’s always cooperation between Israel with the experience in Gaza and CBP on the border. And there isn’t a good map of the tunnels and there isn’t a good understanding of the quantity of tunnels. And it’s actually interesting because when we have the conversations as Traysar with the folks on the ground there and we tell them, look, we have this, we’ll talk about this, but we have a system to get rid of the tunnels.

They’re like, “Oh, that’s perfect. We want to buy it, but first, can you help us find the tunnels?” So it’s like their problem is search and destroy, whereas opposed to here, it’s very much destroy. We know where they are. We need to just get rid of that infrastructure. But in the US, I always say it feels like it’s a decade before where Israel is today.

DUBOWITZ: Right. So detection, mapping, and identification and then destruction.

SOFFER: Yeah. And I don’t know. I mean, the assessments, the range is insane. There are the assessments of hundreds of tunnels and then dozens of tunnels. And one of the reasons I think, one of the reasons potentially for the differences is what constitutes as a tunnel. Recently, one of the interesting conversations we had, they were talking about two inch diameter tunnels that are used as an airpipe to just pass through bags of fentanyl. So it’s not tunnels as you imagine them, definitely not the North Korean tunnels, but sometimes they’re big enough to get people through. Sometimes they’re just small enough to get bags of drugs through.

DUBOWITZ: Okay. So, you and your partners come up with this concept, develop this company. Tell us a little bit about the company. Where is it today? I know you’ve just done a big funding round, so congratulations.

SOFFER: Thank you. Yeah. So we actually, we set out to this domain. We though, all right, underground is an underserved category. The technology doesn’t match the history. There should be a lot of different technologies for underground. And we really had this fundamental belief that the world is looking at it wrong. Meaning we’re bearing it in line items within line items like I told you earlier, it’s the Air Force problem. Let them deal with it. We really have a belief that it needs to be a category as big as air, land, sea, now space. Underground deserves technologies of its own that are not always necessarily even in the form factor, what you would imagine. Today when you think about penetrating underground facilities, you think about missiles. Are missiles the most effective way to get deep underground? No. I mean, look at the mining industry. Look at drilling for oil.

We have better mechanisms to hit underground, but we use kinetics. So that was sort of our initial thesis. And then it’s a big one, right? Because now there’s a series of events that needs to happen in order for the company to materialize. And that ranges from the funding side, right? Getting the venture ecosystem to say, “All right, we’re going to underwrite this risk. And what is the risk?” Venture capitalists, they like to underwrite either a market risk or a technology risk. They don’t love to underwrite both. So when you’re stepping in and you’re like, “All right, we’re going to build technologies for this new industry. What are the technologies? Sci-fi technologies, crazy technologies, which we’ll talk about. Very difficult.” Okay, great. So you must have a huge market. Well, actually, market isn’t there yet, but it’s going to be huge. It’s going to be bigger than what you imagined.

So, it’s a really hard sell to get both across the finish line. And we actually had a hard time at the beginning because I thought, all right, I’ve done this before. My previous company, I would go back to my venture capital friends. We would raise a lot of money and just get at it. And everyone said no. Exactly what I said. We’re underwriting two huge risks. No. So we sort of fell back, and I think this is healthy, and said, “All right, let’s just build something. Let’s put together some friends and family money and just put something together.” And we looked at a lot of different devices. We were considering working with micro TBMs. And eventually we landed on a demolition device used for demolishing overground facilities, like a type of excavator, mini excavator from a Swiss company. And we got the device and it wasn’t ready, call it, to be dropped in a tunnel in Gaza.

So, we refactored it. Actually, it’s sitting over there. You can look at it. So we built this brain behind it, ripped up some of the hydraulic pumps, put some other hydraulic pumps to make it strong enough. We built the system so that it can endure in the underground facilities. And then we literally got this massive winch to hold about one ton. And we dropped it down a tunnel in Gaza. We did this together with Mafat. The military was involved. And that was also a hard lift on its own, just getting them to say, “All right, we’ll give you guys a shot.” We got it in a tunnel in Gaza and it was pretty bad. It didn’t do the job, but I think it did a good enough job of getting the right people who were there to see it to think differently and say, “Holy shit. Like if this is an off the shelf product, maybe they’re onto something. Maybe we can look at tunnel demolition as a mechanical challenge versus as a kinetic challenge like we’re looking at today.” So I think that was a pivotal moment for us because it became from a theory to this can happen and it doesn’t need to take 10 years of development. That whole thing took us end to end about 60 days. So we developed this brain, we got it on an existing device refactor. And then that started the discussion which we wanted to have, which is, all right, if we were to design this mechanical demolition, this underground autonomous system for demolishing underground environments, what we call type one subterrace environments, which is the Hamas tunnels, how would it look like? How much would it cost? How long would it take to develop? I shared some of that on X.

And I think that combination between the military having interest in this, and then X is where the VCs live these days. So something in the defense tech community, we got stirred up about this. We got some of the right eyeballs and this whole funding round came to be from literally cold DMs. So some great investors reached out. We had some really good conversations. They were the right people who were not afraid to underwrite the risk because they understand the size of the opportunity. And then when we got the ball rolling, we had this massively oversubscribed round. We had the best investors we could wish for. We were at a position to choose the right investors to build this category. And also, if you look at the cap table at the end of the day, we really did a very careful job and, call it, curating the investor base because it’s sensitive here.

It matters. The ideology behind the people on your cap table matter. And I would say even more than that, the affiliation to Israel is good and also a risk. So you want people who don’t invest in the company just because they’re big fans of Israel. You want people who invest in the company because they believe underground is the way to establish U.S. deterrence. That’s how you create the category, not through what we’re doing here in Gaza.

DUBOWITZ: So, I saw that Palmer Luckey, who’s the founder and CEO of Anduril, is one of your seed investors.

SOFFER: Can’t comment on that, but some of the founders of Anduril are invested in the company.

DUBOWITZ: Okay.

SOFFER: Yeah.

DUBOWITZ: Yeah. It looked like a great cap table. Yeah. Some serious, prominent people who really know the space. So, I want to talk about your product and the challenges it solves, but I want to talk also about the problem. And you mentioned “Subterra one.” I assume there’s a “Subterra two” and “[Subterra] three?”

SOFFER: Yes. So, we’re going to –

DUBOWITZ: What is that?

SOFFER: So, that’s in the works right now, but part of our job as we see it is giving words or naming the things. Because what we found today, and it’s funny, it’s like what I always say is you’re not going to hear Trump saying “air, land, sea, space, subterranean.” No, just doesn’t sound good. It’s not the style. You might hear him say “air, land, sea, space, Subterra.” So we figured, and I had this in every conversation I had, people are like, “Is it sub-T?” Sub-T is strange. It’s a strange name. Underground. So we said, “You know what? We’ll just name the thing. Call it Subterra. What is Subterra? It’s kind of like maritime. It’s a semi-made up word. It’s short for subterranean. But for us, it encapsulates everything in the intersection between military and underground. So first we said that. Then we said, all right, we keep talking about these environments, but when I talk to policymakers, and not even that, to investors, to engineers, and you say, call it tunnels or underground, depending on what the person recently read, they might imagine North Korea or they might imagine the Hamas tunnels.

It’s a whole different world apart. It has a completely different, call it, use case, and it has a completely different solution. So we said, all right, let’s start having people talk in the right way so they understand what they’re talking about when they’re referencing some sort of underground environment. So, we’re going to put out sort of formal communication around this, which how we believe each category should be defined and what are the metrics that make something Subterra one, Subterra two, Subterra three. But here I can talk to you about it, where we see Subterra one as what we call temporary tunnel facilities. Now, temporary can be for two years, right? But these are not the hardcore command-and-control posts that you might see in Russia and Moscow, in Moscow. These are not the command-and-control facilities obviously that you have in Iran and in Pickaxe Mountain.

These are more of the type of tunnels you will see in Vietnam is a good example. So, the way we define it is sort of Subterra one and two are temporary maneuver tunnels, but different types of geologies. Whereas Subterra three is deeply buried underground facilities for command and control for the long run. Okay.

DUBOWITZ: So just for our listeners and for me, I’ve been in a number of tunnels. Subterra one would be Hamas tunnels that are dug underground in the sand.

SOFFER: Correct. And using concrete infrastructure to sort of just reinforce it.

DUBOWITZ: To reinforce it, right. And this is –

SOFFER: Is – But one of the things I think that are interesting that it was new to me even sort of stepping into this space is, and Asher, my co-founder, kept telling me this and it’s shocking to see. People talk about dismantling the tunnels and you think, I need very heavy hydraulic force or what do you need in order to mechanically dismantle them? A person walking into the tunnels can lift up his hands and drop the concrete and then pull the concrete on top of each other. That’s how weak it is. It’s nothing. But the problem is the clay around it, the clay and the sand remains. So then you need to disrupt the ground in order to induce collapse. But the fact that it’s not like –

DUBOWITZ: Right. I can imagine exactly. I’ve walked through those tunnels, those Hamas tunnels in Gaza. The ones that really struck me were the Hezbollah tunnels in Lebanon. Because they are deeper, bigger, and they are burned out of solid rock, which is pretty remarkable. And so that’s Subterra two.

SOFFER: Two. Yeah.

DUBOWITZ: Subterra three, I imagine, would be the massive tunnels I went through on the DMZ in North Korea. And then the kinds of tunnels today that are buried underground in Iran in which the Iranians have built these major missile cities, really, where they have been storing their launchers and their ballistic missiles and drones. And then I assume it also includes places like Fordow and Natanz and Isfahan

SOFFER: A hundred percent

DUBOWITZ: And Pickaxe Mountain on the nuclear site.

SOFFER: By the way, even the US underground facilities would be in Subterra three. We’re building them for the long run.

DUBOWITZ: Okay. So that very helpful to sort of define the terms and define –

SOFFER: No, I’m glad you asked. And by the way, it’s still a work in progress, right? So this is something we’re actively working on with the right people because when we formally bring it across the table, we actually want D.C. to take this on and to use this terminology because we think it’ll be sort of a good common ground to work on the problem set, to talk about the problem set.

DUBOWITZ: Okay. So define the problem set. Let’s jump back to your systems and how they actually work in these different environments

SOFFER: Yeah. So by the way, you spoke about the tunnels up north in Lebanon in the hard rock. And right behind us there you have something that we developed exactly for that, which is a man deployed drill basically that allows them to drill a hole in the hard rock deep in the hard rock and then insert explosives and induce collapse of underground facilities. And you need to bury it relatively deep and up top because you want the whole thing to collapse and you don’t want just to create a crater, which is what many times happens in underground facilities. So we’re still working and testing this, but because of the different geology, it’s a whole different problem set.

So tour systems, we have the first device we call it an excavator class underground autonomous system, which means it basically looks like a tiny tractor. It knows how to get into an underground tunnel.

Let’s say the ones in Gaza. And it fits in terms of dimensions. It’s small enough to get in and operate in the tunnels. It’s small enough to take 90 degree angle turns in the tunnels, which is difficult there. But most importantly, it’s powerful enough using a jackhammer and a bucket, literally using demolition tools to both induce collapse of the concrete infrastructure. The one we said that a human can just pull out, get it to the ground and then break it. But also it has the tools on it in order to disturb the ground above and induce structural collapse of the sand and the clay. So the way it works is it goes all the way to the end of the tunnel, which by the way, is a feat on its own. Just getting to the end of these tunnels, sometimes you have just like a random pile of sand, random pile of dirt separating between one side of the tunnel and another.

Another time you have concrete slabs that just fell over. And another time you have like straight up glass door. So, the device needs to be powerful enough to maneuver past all of these things. So we had to install the right tools. Again, whether it’s a regular bucket or whether it’s a jackhammer or a breaker and the capability to replace the tools in order for it to drive all the way to the end of the tunnel and then start eating the tunnel from within, demolishing it. So when it goes back out, it leaves a trail of demolished tunnel. Now, a lot of people ask about mapping tunnels. Why not just send a drone? And when you actually see the tunnels, you realize it’s ridiculous because of all this stuff there. So when we designed this device, we really had to put an emphasis on what we call its maneuverability.

And in the underground environment, it’s 10 times more difficult. It’s tethered by the way, as an example of the difficulty. It needs to be tethered because you lose communication otherwise it’s not reliable. So if you really want something to work, keep a tether, a fiber optic cable where you get all the data and communication back for, but that becomes a challenge on its own because then the cable can’t be on the floor. So we have this smart spooling system where the spool doesn’t get too big, but it releases and creates tension in order for the spool to always be above ground. And there’s like a million engineering challenges that just emerge as a side effect from wanting to get this underground mechanical system to demolish what we call Subterra one tunnels.

DUBOWITZ: So, the idea of sending the system to the end of the tunnel and then starting to work backwards obviously on the assumption that you’re going to get your system back.

SOFFER: Yeah.

DUBOWITZ: Systems are not going to sort of self-destruct.

SOFFER: Yeah.

DUBOWITZ: Second is you’re going to use the actual infrastructure of the tunnel to collapse on itself.

SOFFER: Yes.

DUBOWITZ: Rather than necessarily having to use explosives.

SOFFER: Right.

DUBOWITZ: Thought explosives still remains an option.

SOFFER: It remains a mechanism and it remains a mechanism on the device. So as part of the attachments of the device, we have this drill that we said man deployed, but also call it system deployed where the system itself knows how to get to the end of the tunnel and then drill a hole and insert explosives where needed. We can get into this as well, but there’s the entire cement strategy that’s been gaining more and more traction right now and filling the tunnels up with cement. So we’re also working closely with the military on that, whereas how does Pacman support cement? For example, for tunnel clearing, when you want to pour cement, you need to make sure the tunnel is cleared. So Pacman actually goes in and out without doing the demolition. And then it clears the way in order for the cement to come in. And another case is where cement is very good for very long areas of work.

You want to fill up miles of tunnel, cement is perfect. But the problem we see in Gaza, and this is very applicable to the US focus right now in rebuilding Gaza, is let’s say you have a couple of underground facilities, let’s say less than a mile in length. They’re just like coming out to the sides and there isn’t one artery connecting them. You want to destroy those. Do you set up? Getting cement in a tunnel is a project. You need basically a mini cement factory there to pump the cement in strong enough so that it just goes through everything. So in some cases, it’s not worth the logistical operation. Whereas our device essentially is dropped in, gets to the end, does it much more simple. So the idea is to operate a fleet of these on these, call it, short-range tunnels and also for the long-range tunnels to work together with the military in order to clear the way so that the cement can fill up the tunnels.

DUBOWITZ: Okay. And you mentioned, is it the name of the system Pac-Man? Or you call it Pac-Man?

SOFFER: We’re not allowed to use the word Pac-Man.

DUBOWITZ: Right, why not?

SOFFER: That’s why I don’t say it. It’s not our trademark. So we’re going to have to figure out a long-term name.

DUBOWITZ: Yeah, because you’re not old enough to remember Pac-Man, but this was a game that we all played in the 80s.

SOFFER: 80s. No, that’s why we called it. But it turns out you can’t just use the name. So we’re not using Pac-Man. All right. For the record

DUBOWITZ: All right, for the record, not using Pac-Man. But colloquially –

SOFFER: Colloquially-

DUBOWITZ: It’s great way of saying it.

SOFFER: It is.

DUBOWITZ: Okay. So that’s one system. And that would be for subterranean one tunnels? Yeah.

SOFFER: Subterra one environments.

DUBOWITZ: Subterra one environments. Also applicable for Subterra two environments?

SOFFER: It’s A good question because not. I mean, depends. So for example, the explosive insertion is very relevant to two, but mechanical demolition, you’re not going to demolish hard rock with a jackhammer. You’re just going to increase the surface area. So it’s the same device potentially, yes, but it’s a very different component on top of it. That’s why we also built it in a relatively modular way. So again, at the end of the day, this thing is very simple. It’s two tracks. It has a hydraulic pump that gives it essentially the power to do what it needs to do. And then it has an arm, a retractable arm, and then it has different components. So again, like a jackhammer, a brake or a drill or whatever you need. And it knows how to flip between those components in order to get the job done. So you told

DUBOWITZ: So, you told me before we started recording, you hate that term robot.

SOFFER: I do.

DUBOWITZ: But it does conjure up in my mind.

SOFFER: Kind of like a robot. Yeah.

DUBOWITZ: A robot kind of coming into this tunnel and the robot’s got, you know, it’s got a pick axe and it’s got a bucket and it’s got some explosives. And you’re sort of sending in the robot or the system.

SOFFER: The system. I’ll tell you why. I mean, the reason we have a hard time with robots is just like… have you ever seen a robot that can survive, let’s say, I don’t know, 200 pounds of a cement slab falling on it? I have not. Every robot I’ve seen is kind of weak. And in these environments, the military always uses robots. We’ve seen the military robots. Their biggest problem is that their survivability is like zero. The slightest inconvenience, the robot can’t operate. So ours is like, would you call a D9 a robot? No. Even if it’s an autonomous D9, it’s a D9, it’s a monster.

DUBOWITZ: The D9. Or the big caterpillar.

SOFFER: Exactly.

DUBOWITZ: The big caterpillar machines used to move huge amounts of ground earth, right?

SOFFER: Right. So that’s how we built the system. And the core of the system and everything we learn from is from those areas. We learn from caterpillar. We don’t learn from the humanoid companies. So that’s why we’re careful with the word robots.

DUBOWITZ: Well, you could use another colloquial term again for my youth, not yours, which is terminator.

SOFFER: Terminator. Yeah.

DUBOWITZ: When I think of robots –

SOFFER: Terminator is pretty durable. We’re building terminators for the underground

DUBOWITZ: Yeah. That guy survived everything that was thrown at him. All right. So we sort of company, financing, founders, problem set.

SOFFER: That’s just the device here though, I will say. We have an entire team working in our headquarters in Austin. And that’s a drilling class autonomous system. So the class matters here as we call them, because also it’s like, where does the mind go? You think excavator class, you realize it kind of looks like an excavator. You think drilling class, it’s so different. And for defense tech companies, call it companies in general these days, we’re so used to having the starship. What do you do? We’re building starship. We’re building this crazy piece of machinery. If this works, that’s it. The company wins. For us, it’s so far away from that. We’re a factory of building underground systems. The reason being, the government, and you know this better than I do, but what we’ve been seeing is there is no coherent strategy in how to win wars underground.

So as we’re building out our products, we’re building out the strategy with policymakers, with D.C. to sort of figure out where it’s going to go. And does it go to survivability? Does it go to rapidly burying data centers, rapidly burying command-and-control posts in the Middle East so our forces don’t get hit? Or, does it go maybe to striking? Does it go to striking Pickaxe Mountain? And that’s a whole other set of capabilities, right? Our ability to strike a deeply buried target versus our ability to bury our own targets. So our responsibility today as the market is still being created is to have a range of systems so that when the market becomes, and let’s say DIU announces an RFP for –

DUBOWITZ: So that’s the Defense Innovation unit.

SOFFER: Right. So when they announce large prototyping contracts, we want to be able to capture them whether it’s around survivability or whether it’s around strike. So our team in Austin, which is all ex-SpaceX, ex-boring company, and it’s an amazing combination by the way, the focus is on creating something that basically looks like a horizontal drill. Have you ever seen that before? Not many people imagine how horizontal drill looks, but this sort of thing like this big, basically, you drop it on the ground in a trench and then it pushes its way through the dirt. Now, these things are typically limited. They don’t get very far.

DUBOWITZ: So the horizontal drilling, again, I’m not an energy expert, but was that used in the energy sector as well? They were drilling vertically and then they were able to drill actually horizontally defined.

SOFFER: Yes, it was, but I would say it’s more common in laying piping infrastructure. And the method is piping. So you drop in a pipe and then you push the pipe and then you drop in another pipe and you push that pipe. And it’s very limited to range. So I mean, I love this. The conversations with our team will step in and we’ll be like, we’ll ask this. We’ll get an off the shelf product. This worked for us in Gaza where we bought an off the shelf product, dropped it in, and then everyone saw the decision makers and then we got some budget for it. And so we said, all right, we’re going to copy this. We’re going to copy paste the strategy. We’re going to buy an off the shelf product, try to use it for the military use case that we need.

In this case, it’s maneuvering through the crust of the earth. So it’s explosive insertion. It’s getting signals, effects through the crust of the earth from point A to point B. So it’s digging our own tunnels now. And then we ask the manufacturer, we say, “All right, you told us this thing is limited to one mile. We want to go 50 miles. Why is it limited?” And then they’ll tell you, “Listen, it’s the motor.” So you say, “Okay, what’s the limiting factor in the motor?” They’ll say the size. They’re like, “All right, what if I have a motor the size of fricking shipping container? Would that fix it?” And then yes, no, maybe. And then you get to another set of problems. So they say, “You know what? Maybe we can fix the…” Not them like us, right? Maybe we can fix the range. But the pipes themselves, when you’re piping and the rig is already like, call it, five miles out, then the pipes themselves are not necessarily strong enough to withstand the pressure.

So now you need to go to material science and figure out the pipes. And I haven’t even started talking about communication. So it turns out you have like pipes that know how to create a communication line back. So there’s all these challenges just like we had in the excavator class system that pop up when you try to do something novel. And why do we try to do this specific thing? Why is the focus here? Well, in Gaza it was obvious, right? We need to demolish those tunnels. There’s a thousand miles of underground terror infrastructure. But for here, we’re looking at Iran and we’re thinking, all right, how would we strike underground if it didn’t need to be air deployed, if it wasn’t kinetic? What would be the ultimate method if we look at drilling these days to get to these deeply buried facilities? And then we work from that and try to figure out what the next device might look like.

DUBOWITZ: Okay. So I came here and this is all a prelude to what I really want to ask you –

SOFFER: Let’s go.

DUBOWITZ: Is to destroy Pickaxe mountain.

SOFFER: Okay.

DUBOWITZ: All Right. So 300 to 450 feet underground, granite, under a mountain.

SOFFER: It’s like a villain story. It’s crazy. It

DUBOWITZ: Is. It’s like the Bond villain lair. And underground there, if I would speculate, they’re not going to build one enrichment facility. They’re going to build multiple linked facilities at different depths. So that if one gets destroyed or a second gets destroyed, there’s a third, there’s a fourth, there’s a fifth. According to Wall Street Journal reporting from a couple of weeks ago, they’ve moved thousands of advanced centrifuges into Pickaxe Mountain. Not clear whether they’ve moved enriched material that is sitting at Fordow and Natanz, Isfahan that’s buried under the rubble. But surely the Iranians are going to try to figure out some way of getting enriched uranium or highly enriched uranium into these tunnels. And there, they’re going to also put in uranium metal production. They’re going to have weapon scientists working on the bomb. In other words, Pickaxe Mountain could emerge as a full spectrum nuclear weapons production facility. And here’s the problem is, according to public reporting, and we don’t know exactly what the private assessments are, that our most potent weapons, our massive ordinance penetrators that were dropped from B2 bombers during the June war of last year, Midnight Hammer.

I think 12 of them were actually dropped on the Fordow facility, which was not as deep, was built with ventilation shafts. And they had trained for many, many years to drop these bombs right down the ventilation shaft and able to actually collapse the facility and destroy the enrichment plants. According to public reporting, we can’t do that because it’s too deep. It’s too heavily fortified and it’s too dispersed. So, okay, go. What’s the mission? And how do we actually use your systems to accomplish the objective?

SOFFER: Yeah. So I think to add to that, it’s not just the depth and the material. It’s also how they build these tunnels. They have both shafts and cavities to absorb the shock waves. So it’s really built in a structure that makes it difficult to hit the underground facilities, not just because of the material itself, but it seems that as they’re building out these facilities, they’re thinking about obviously the strike vector. So, it’s a whole other set of rules where your opponent is essentially building not just to protect from your average missiles, but as you say, from the GBU 57s, from the penetrators. And an interesting point on those penetrators is that the military did identify this back in the last Iran strike. There was a small. I think it didn’t get enough attention, but there was a grant issued for $200 million, which is not bad, for development of next gen bunker busters and went to Boeing and ARA, which is good.

I think we’re going to see more of those. By the way, DARPA issued an RFI, again, super early, no money tied to it, but still it shows you where the organization is thinking around new ways to induce shock waves in underground facilities. Which is very interesting also for us personally, because we’re not only thinking about missiles. We’re not trying to compete with the GBU 57s right now. So for us, I don’t know the answer. And if I had the perfect answer to strike Iran right now, I likely wouldn’t be able to talk about it. But I’ll say that the way we’re treating these problems is more of a drilling problem, as I said earlier, than a military problem. Now, there’s a lot of pushback to that. You think about that, the biggest pushback is what are you going to do? Are you going to get boots on the ground there?

And I think that opens up an interesting discussion because when we say “boots on the ground,” we think of invading Iran, but there’s different types of boots on the ground. If it takes one special ops mission in order to take out Pickaxe Mountain, might be worth it. So when people rush to say “no boots on the ground,” it doesn’t need to be umbrella, no boots on the ground. There are methods to get there to penetrate the target. And if the return is worth the risk, then the military will do it. It’s not that we don’t have the capability at all. But the question then becomes if you do get boots on the ground, what types of systems do you deploy? So when we look at drilling systems, we look at ways to both, I wouldn’t even say autonomously. I would say intelligently navigate the underground facilities that you’re boring.

One of the biggest problems with boring holes, right? Now I’m talking about the general category of boring. You look at what Elon Musk is doing in Vegas. They’re dealing with hard rock there. And they’re dealing with large diameter hard rock. So the logistical footprint is massive, but they’re doing it. It can be done. They’re doing it using high pressure water jets to bore through hard rock. You need to deal with the dirt removal. You need to deal with everything. But the way we look at it is we look at these challenges. So challenge number one is how do you bore through whatever you need to get through? So for example, what I told you earlier, what we’re doing in Austin, it’s not going to work with the regular piping method. You’re not just going to bash the hard rock. It doesn’t work. So you need a type of drill bit on the other side.

What is that drill? What is the boring mechanism? So again, high pressure water jets is a very effective method to get through hard rock. Start developing a system that specializes in boring through the specific set of geology that you need to get through. But then the second problem that emerges is steering. You want to pinpoint, you want to be very precise onto where you get in the underground facility. So you’re dealing with slippage, which is very normal working in underground environments. And so we use methods, by the way, some of them that we’ve used in order to identify, to detect the tunnels in Gaza, in order to pinpoint where a device is on an X, Y, Z axis underground. So think about it. We have something literally boring its way through the earth and we know where it is at all time. That has a lot of value.

That thing is carrying whatever we want. And it can be five inch, 10 inch, 100 inch diameter. And it’s going through the earth right now. And the argument also is, okay, it’s very noisy. Let’s say, what do you do about it? What do you do about it? Imagine now, I would tell you, look, there’s something boring through the earth that’s going to arrive here in like 10 minutes. What are you going to do? Try to get an excavator to dig for it. There are no interceptors for these types of technologies. So even if you’re loud, even if you’re detectable, it may be too late. So this is how we’re thinking about the problem set. Getting things that know how to maneuver on their own through the crust of the earth at a relatively high, low depth and very precisely, and carry whatever they need to carry.

And then we start knocking off the different challenges, whether it’s navigation, whether it’s boring, whether it’s dirt removal, whether it’s precision. And eventually we get to a point where we have the capabilities to strike these deeply buried targets.

DUBOWITZ: Timing?

SOFFER: Timing. Great question. I mean, look, so that takes me sort of to, I would say, call it sales or government relations or how you build a defense tech company. Right now, we’re way too early to, I would say, even think about capturing a program of record near term. We’re trying to create new budgets in Congress for this space. So my focus right now is getting the prototyping contracts, but the prototyping contracts aren’t even there. The prototyping authorities will come out and say, “All right, we want drones that can lift, whatever, 300 pounds.” And they’ll put a budget on it and then the different startups will compete and someone will win.

For us, it’s about writing the requirements. So we have two jobs right now. One is on the R&D front. Yes, we’ll develop it. And with the funding we have, I think we can get to real milestones, call it within, I mean, the autonomous, the excavator class system. For Gaza, it’s going to be fully the next system, right? Not the refactored first one that we did in two months. The next system is going to be ready in October, which is end-to-end, clean-sheet build in about nine months. So the development time can be very short. Same thing with Austin.

DUBOWITZ: That’ll be deployable?

SOFFER: Deployable in October. Yeah.

DUBOWITZ: In Gaza.

SOFFER: Yeah.

DUBOWITZ: Going after tunnels.

SOFFER: Yeah. We’ve been in Gaza already with the refactored one, but hopefully this is going to be a much bigger scale. Now, there’s a lot of politics in here. There’s the U.S. Board of Peace. There’s the Israeli Prototyping Authority, which is Mafat. There’s Pikud Darom, which is like the – Southern Command. Southern Command. Yeah. So there’s a lot of different units to triangulate with. Obviously, there’s Yahalom. It’s the combat engineering corps who are doing a lot of deployment. So there’s a lot of work to be done, call it on the government, on the sales, on the whatever we call it side. But yes, the device will be ready to go. And I do think that also on the, call it “political side” or on the “deployment side,” we will likely be operating in Gaza within that timeframe. So very short overall. And I would say the same thing is going to happen within Austin.

But in the U.S., I think the gap between call it the R&D is ready to a product we can demonstrate and call it granite and wherever to actually deploying somewhere or for the military to adopt these capabilities. There’s a gap of, call it, influence and a gap of funding. So the company, everyone asks us, okay, you raised $25 million. Now everything’s going to R&D, right? You’re hiring a bunch of engineers. I’m like, actually, we’re hiring a bunch of folks from government, ex-White House, ex-DoW that understand how the procurement cycles work, that understand how to write the requirements, that understand the prototyping authorities, who cares about this in the government. So my personal focus right now has been that, has been getting to a point where, all right, let’s say DIU gives us or whatever prototyping authority gives us a $20 million check and says, “All right, we want to be ready.” Typical prototyping cycle is about 24 months.

There was actually, I think they just released a new directive where the government wants to see systems fielded in 24 months. I think we can beat that. I think we can get to systems fielded in eight months. But the question is, where are we going to field it? Who are we going to demonstrate it to? Will there be a client? So on the R&D front, I think it’s very doable. I think the bottleneck right now is actually government.

DUBOWITZ: Which I have to say, as somebody who’s been obsessed with Pickaxe Mountain for many years and obsessed with Iran’s nuclear weapons program and has been struggling, and I think many people have been struggling to figure out what to do about it, is unsatisfying answer. So I mean, if you can get to by October Subterra one and by when Subterra two?

SOFFER: Let’s say June or August next year.

DUBOWITZ: June or August of next year. I mean, I would think that there would be huge incentive both in Israel and in the United States to do an absolute crash program and move as quickly as possible and throw as much money as possible and as needed at this and actually get a system that’s ready to deploy. Because again, I’m obsessed with Pickaxe Mountain, but there are clearly applications, our southern border, missile cities, cartels using this, drug dealers, terrorists, and militaries that we don’t have years to waste. And we certainly don’t have years to wait for DoW’s slow procurement process to grind its way through and finally get you guys to where you need to be.

SOFFER: I agree. Look – I mean,

DUBOWITZ: Isn’t this a five-alarm emergency for the United States?

SOFFER: I think so. Look, I think. But you do see little slices of funding for the penetrators, right? The penetration munition. The question is, do people understand that the method to strike these facilities is not necessarily the methods we know? So that’s a big question. And I do think looking at DARPA’s RFI, looking at some interest in the Pentagon, that the consensus is starting to change towards, okay, maybe it’s not air deployed, maybe it’s not only kinetic. Maybe there are new methods or alternative methods to strike deeply buried targets. I completely agree with you obviously. And it’s not even about Traysar. I think the government right now should be going out back to back every day with new programs, funding new methods to strike deeply buried targets. I mean, look at all defense tech, look at all the drones, look at all the money pouring into new ideas, new categories and new companies.

The number one problem for us right now as the U.S. is that we don’t have deterrence underground. Why is this not a priority? Get us underground deterrence. The government shouldn’t care how. Doesn’t matter. It can be plasma drilling. It can be new types of bombs. It can be kinetic. That’s fine. New penetrators. But why aren’t the prototyping authorities going out every day and banging on the industry door and saying, “We want to develop US Subterra deterrence.” That’s very far from reality right now. And by the way, the reason also may be semi-political. If you say that, that is like admitting defeat. That is admitting that we don’t have underground deterrence. The US doesn’t want to say that. We want to say, look what we did in Fordow. We have these 30,000-pound bombs. When the B2 goes up in the air, we want to be able to say, look how strong we are.

DUBOWITZ: The big, beautiful B2, as President Trump called it.

SOFFER: Exactly.

DUBOWITZ: He was asked about Pickaxe Mountain finally a couple of weeks ago. And I guess at FDD, we’ve been pushing Pickaxe Mountain for years and banging our head against a granite wall. And finally, Hugh Hewitt and Trey Yingst asked him and good, President Trump acknowledged the problem. And then he said, not to worry, we’re going to put a missile right through the front door. Sounds great, but you’re not going to put a missile through the front door. I mean, maybe you can –

SOFFER: I agree. Sounds great.

DUBOWITZ: Yeah. I mean, maybe you can blow up entrances and exits.

SOFFER: Portals. Yeah. That’s the strategy. By the way, that’s the strategy. And that’s always claimed as a victory in the US. And that’s the big question. If you blow up portals, did you shut down the facility? In my opinion, the answer is of course not.

DUBOWITZ: Of course not.

SOFFER: You have to get down there and you have to destroy the facility underground and everything that’s in it. And by the way, that leads to another huge problem set that I don’t think is getting enough attention, which is BDA, right? The battle damage assessment. Today, no one knows what we’re hitting. That’s a massive problem. And literally, you’ll talk across the board to everyone, intelligence. The only way we know what we hit is through intelligence these days. So definitely there’s no. Forget about optics, but there’s no good way to assess what the damage was. So that’s why also as civilians, we’re all seeing conflicting reports because it goes all the way up. No one understands. So we in our systems also put an extreme emphasis, like a freakish emphasis on BDAs, also in the tunnels in Gaza. Huge problem as well. You fill them up with cement.

One of the bigger problems they’re seeing with cement is that the terrorists are re-digging the tunnels because the cement didn’t go all the way to the top. So you have a small cavity. They get in the cavity and then they dig. And then what ends up happening is now they have reinforced infrastructure for their new tunnels. And that is because of a lack of BDA because no one said, wait, the cement seeped in through the sides. We need to pump more or whatever. Same thing in Iran. We’re hitting and we don’t have the capability to say with certainty, this is what we hit. So a big process of our engineering cycles is BDA first. When we’re thinking about drilling class systems to penetrate deeply buried targets, can we do this in a way that delivers back a BDA? And that’s really challenging because if you’re blowing up the facility, how do you send back something?

And that’s why we think about tethered systems. We think about, we go creative here because we do believe that it matters. Imagine also the political win it would be if Trump could strike like Pickaxe Mountain and then you’d actually see like a photo or something of the damage done there. You never see that. You see these small satellite images because at the end of the day, maybe we didn’t do a ton of damage.

DUBOWITZ: Okay. Maybe I’m naive about how this works and I don’t understand sophisticated procurement processes of United States and Israel. But if it were me, I would basically lock a bunch of guys in the room. It would be you, your engineers, the guys from DDR&D, the guys from Mafat, the Israeli DDR&D. I would put in people from Delta Force and Shaldag, Israeli Special Forces. That’s essentially the Israeli equivalent. And I would say, okay, we have a problem. We have Pickaxe Mountain.

SOFFER: We have X months. Yeah.

DUBOWITZ: We have X months and we got to figure out a mission. And it’s going to be a technological mission. It’s going to be a special forces mission. It may require boots on the ground. We may have to insert these things by human beings. We’re going to need X, Y, and Z. Okay. Speck it out, figure it out. Give me a timeline. How much money do you need? I need deliverable systems by this date. Go.

SOFFER: Yeah.

DUBOWITZ: And that would seem to be how you solve problems, right?

SOFFER: Yeah. But I think it’s like with all political systems and incentives and ego, there’s a lot of different drivers here. And at the end of the day, if you pick up random people from the Pentagon and ask them, “Are we able to strike Pickaxe Mountain?” A lot of people might tell you, yeah. I don’t think a lot of people will tell you, “No, we don’t have the capability to do so.” Because we want to think. We want to believe that –

DUBOWITZ: Well, I hope that’s true. I mean, I hope it’s true that –

SOFFER: I also hope we have the capabilities.

DUBOWITZ: But you and I are not aware of developments underway right now

SOFFER: A hundred percent. No, but I don’t even think they treat it as new.

DUBOWITZ: In dark rooms –

SOFFER: Oh, for sure.

DUBOWITZ: Of new GBU 57s times 10 that have the ability to go –

SOFFER: Much deeper.

DUBOWITZ: Vertically and then horizontally and are able to actually face massive damage on these kinds of sites. I mean, there is something called, by the way, the US-Israel Optech Working Group, which was established by Congress. FDD was very involved in getting it stood up. And it is a –

SOFFER: Is that part of the Anti-Tunnel Cooperation Act or no?

DUBOWITZ: That was separate. Though anti-tunneling is part of the working group is my understanding. But essentially, it’s bringing together folks from the Department of War and the Ministry of Defense and Mafat and DDR&D and working through a whole set of military challenges. Hypersonics and drones and edge computing. And I mean, there are many of these technologies, including anti-tunneling technology that I think our folks are looking at with your folks. This would seem to be a natural fit for the Optech working group where there is actually already a system and a process and Congress is legislated. I don’t know how much money’s been allocated, but there are smart people, hard at work right now on these kinds of military challenges. Within that framework, you potentially could see my scenario where you pull everybody together and you bring in all of these different people with different capabilities from special forces to engineering to planning and pull them all together and solve this problem and get us a deliverable solution, not in years, but in months.

SOFFER: I think that’s where industry comes in also. And obviously this wave of defense tech companies and defense tech has a category, that [sort of] Anduril pioneered. But I think one of the big differences here, and this we see a lot, we do work with special ops teams, both in Israel and the US. By the way, a lot of our engineers come from like 76 [Seret Matgal], the special ops units here. And they worked in, they call it weapon systems unit in these special units. So we really have a lot of the in-house capabilities of how special systems are designed for the military, like for a specific project, for a specific target. And I will say that within those, there’s a lot of developments in that Subterra domain. So, what we see though, is that the speed of development is very different. So they’ll say, oh yeah, I worked on a similar projects, but the speed and the funding and the chain of command in order to get things authorized.

And what’s fascinating is that many times we’ll come up with an idea and someone on our team will be like, “Oh, you know what? I actually worked on this.” And then we’ll ask what happened. And they’ll be like, “Eh, it didn’t get enough attention, so it died down.” But now you have venture capital dollars, which are high risk, high reward by definition. And they’re basically saying, “Forget about it. Get the spark of interest from a prototyping authority. We’ll fund part of it. Let them fund part of it, but let’s get to a product in six months rather than six years and show the skeptics that it works.” So I think that’s also a critical change and a critical distinction. It’s not that the military doesn’t have programs in dark rooms working on these things. They do and they’re great. And they have the best engineers in the world, I would say.

But they have a lot of conflicting decisions to make. They have priorities to set. It changes all the time. Whereas in private industry, can do what you want. You work towards a finish line, you get there. And I think that you see D.C. affected by this, by the rapid innovation in the commercial market.

DUBOWITZ: Well, we have to as Americans. I mean, we have to change our model of development and procurement. And the other thing we have to do is we have to leverage incredible talents in Israel because it’s not just that Israel’s got great entrepreneurs and engineers, which of course it does. But it’s also, as you say, that your people are coming from the battlefield. These are technologies that are literally being used and implemented in real time under conditions of severe threat and crises, which tends to cut procurement decisions and production decisions and time-to-market decisions by a major factor. So, coming here, being in Israel, learning about the defense tech sector, coming to your company, you can just see that there’s a different and heightened level of urgency to get this out, because your lives are on the line.

SOFFER: Yeah. I think it really is like the proximity to deployment too. And I think it’s very interesting looking at this through the, call it “startup lens” where in the U.S. developing, I would say, long-term contracts with the DoW is at least for us, and I think for many, even these drone companies getting to massive quantities of drones, always “China, China, China.” Are we going to get in a war with China tomorrow? Hopefully not. It’s all about deterrence in the U.S. It’s about putting together technologies and hoping, I think we can all hope that we never use them. Whereas in Israel, it’s reactionary to something that’s happening. And there’s always this criticism on Israel that we’re very tactical, but not strategic. And I think it makes sense because every time there’s something to deal with, so there’s no time to think about long-term, where in the US it’s completely different.

It’s like we’re building technologies that will maybe use in 20 years when the time comes. And that’s why also our push so much is around deterrence underground. We want our adversaries, we want Iran to say, eh, it’s not worth digging Pickaxe Mountain. It’s not worth building the facilities.

DUBOWITZ: We don’t have time when it comes to Iran. Maybe we’ll have time with respect to China. I don’t know. I can’t read Xi Jinping’s mind. Maybe he’s going to invade Taiwan in 2027, 2028.

SOFFER: Very hard to read.

DUBOWITZ: Hard to know. What I do know, for sure, is today we’re in a hot war with the Islamic Republic of Iran, and the Islamic Republic of Iran is rebuilding its nuclear weapons program.

Deeply underground at Pickaxe and maybe at other sites. It is reconstituting its missile program. That that we haven’t destroyed is still available for use. That what we have destroyed is being rebuilt with assistance of China and Russia and North Korea and other players. And the president is deeply frustrated right now with his options. And so it’s long past the time where we need the kind of technologies that allow us to do exactly what the Iranians have done so well and have trained Hezbollah to do and Hamas to do, and we’re trained by the North Koreans to do, which is to fight underground and to store their most deadly weapons underground and to build nuclear weapons underground. So I think the United States, we may have time with respect to China. We don’t have time with respect to Islamic Republic of Iran.

SOFFER: Yeah, I agree. I always say that the B2 created the opposite effect. Because it didn’t create the deterrence. It created the catalyst for Iran to say, “All right, underground works. Underground works. We’ll continue to do what we’re doing.” And so there needs to be some sort of decisive strike that shows “we can hit your underground facilities,” but how it looks, how it seems today is that we don’t have the capabilities and that’s very worrying. And I don’t know, there were recently articles also about the depletion of the stock of the penetrators that we have, which is a whole other problem. How do we get to that stage? So there’s a series of problems when it comes to our ability to strike underground. And you’ve got to ask yourself the question, why hasn’t this been a priority all this time? We knew it was coming. We see it all around our adversaries using that domain.

DUBOWITZ: Well, Yadin, it’s been a pleasure. Thank you. First of all, thank you for having me at your company. Thank you for all you and your men and women have done to protect Western civilization. And I’ve taken up too much of your time, so get back to work.

SOFFER: Hell yeah, let’s go.

DUBOWITZ: And develop this technology. Get it out, get it deployed so that we can destroy Pickaxe Mountain. And looking forward to seeing how the company progresses and looking forward to have you back when we know more.

SOFFER: Thank you. Thank you so much. Thanks for coming by. It was a great discussion.

DUBOWITZ: Thank you, sir.