The Defense and Tech Podcast

Iron Dome engineer: Israel must be the 'FedEx for space'

Hilla Haddad Chmelnik certified the Iron Dome for combat, led Israel's national innovation policy, and now aims to make cargo delivery to orbit as routine as a courier shipment, at a few hundred dollars per kilo. In this wide-ranging conversation, Chmelnik reveals that the Iron Dome was built on what we now call machine learning long before the term existed, and that she would not redesign a single component today. She explains how her startup, Moonshot Space, is developing a kinetic launch system: ground-based electromagnetic acceleration that pushes payloads to orbit without rockets, cutting launch costs dramatically.  "We want to be the FedEx to space," she says. On Israel's strategic future, her warning is blunt: if Israel fails to plant a flag on the moon, it risks becoming geopolitically irrelevant: "We will not be a country." Chmelnik also offers a rare insider critique of Israel's innovation gap: the country ranks top 10-15 globally in AI readiness but is trending downward, is failing to tap Arab citizens, ultra-Orthodox, and peripheral communities for top talent, and still lacks a civilian space law separating commercial from defense use. She draws a direct line from the trauma of living under rocket fire to the entrepreneurial resilience that makes Israel's startup ecosystem unique, and predicts a post-war startup boom once veterans get two to three years of quiet academic time.

'Nobody can hide at sea': Windward CEO on Iran's maritime war

Iran has struck 37 commercial vessels in the Strait of Hormuz, and ships are now going dark at a rate 600% higher than before. Windward CEO Ami Daniel, who nearly died when Hezbollah hit his Navy ship in 2006, explains what's really happening at sea.

Cando attitude: Inside Israel's autonomous drone revolution

In the latest Defense and Tech by the Jerusalem Post podcast, host Anna Ahronheim sits down with Ghil Hardy, VP of Business Development at Cando and the ROM360 initiative.Cando, whose tagline is "You dream it, we drone it," delivers a 360-degree turnkey solution combining products [https://www.jpost.com/podcast/jpost-podcast/article-895194], services, and AI analytics, built by founders who include former IDF [https://www.jpost.com/podcast/article-894638] leaders who helped establish Israel's UAV units.The highlight of this episode is the discussion on how deones can impact the future of health. Hardy mentioned that Cando is conducting tests in order to make future organ transportations via drone a reality.

$5,000 drones are killing troops: Here's how to fix it.

Host Anna Ahronheim sits down with Tomer Malchi, founder and CEO of ASIO Technologies, whose Orion handheld system has been in the hands of IDF troops for nearly a decade, to unpack the rapid transformation of ground warfare. From GPS spoofing during the Iran campaign, to "ground dominance" as a new operational doctrine, to the uncomfortable truth that "a nice chunk" of Israeli combat casualties have come from friendly fire, Malchi makes the case that the individual warfighter, not the fighter jet, is now the center of gravity in modern combat. Malchi explains why "nobody dared to say" the words ground dominance before the recent conflicts, how the Ukraine drone war reshaped every land army on the planet "within a few years only," and why aerial assets vanish the moment a major campaign like Iran opens, leaving battalions to fight without GPS, without communications, and often without higher command. He details how ASIO's Orion turns ordinary battalions into "super battalions" through augmented reality, real-time 3D terrain rendering generated by drones, and an optical data-sharing method that lets soldiers operate completely off-grid. He also reveals that one of Orion's most-used capabilities turned out to be one his team didn't initially design for: friendly fire prevention.

Drone tech's impact on warfare: From tactical drones to high-precision missiles

This Defense & Tech episode features an in-depth conversation with Menahem Landau, a defense tech expert and managing partner at Coverlet Ventures. He discusses the evolving landscape of Israeli defense technology, particularly drones, and how innovation is shaping military strategies in conflicts such as the war in Ukraine and tensions in the Middle East. Landau also explores the growing collaboration between Israel and the US in defense tech and the future of the industry.