All Quiet on the Second Front

Roughly $100 billion a year goes into federal IT, and by GAO’s count about 80% of it goes to maintaining old, complex legacy code bases. As AI speeds up everything built around them, those code bases become the thing the whole enterprise waits on. Jake Sortor ran into this himself as an intelligence officer in Iraq, trying to get a Python script he'd written tested on a secure network. He leads public sector at Blitzy now, and his argument is that AI is the only thing that attacks a backlog this size — with humans still making every decision that matters.
What's happening on the second front:
Why maintaining legacy code, not model capability, is the ceiling on government software speed
What “human in the lead” actually looks like when 80–90% of the development lifecycle is automated
The case that automation turns developer work into judgment — architecture, deployment, configuration — rather than eliminating it
Why state and local government may be the most underserved and most transferable market in modernization
What Jake learned teaching himself Python downrange in Iraq to fix a clunky Excel workflow, and the heat he took for it

Jake Sortor is a former Air Force intelligence officer who taught economics at the Air Force Academy, went on to a JD/MBA and a year in corporate law, and now leads public sector at Blitzy while continuing to serve in the reserves.

Connect with Jake
LinkedIn: Jake Sortor

Connect with Tyler
LinkedIn: Tyler Sweatt

In 2020, telling people that organized actors were using bots to shape what the public believes got you called a conspiracy theorist. 
The one audience that didn't need convincing was the national security community, which had been thinking about the battle for perception long before it had a commercial market.
Now, the problem has a name — cognitive warfare — and it has changed shape. The target is no longer the information environment. It is cognition itself, and AI has collapsed the cost of attacking it. Blackbird CEO Wasim Khaled returns to All Quiet to walk through what narrative attacks look like now, who is actually getting hit, and why monitoring the problem was never the mission.
What’s happening on the Second Front: 
Why “misinformation” and fact-checking became the wrong frame, and what narrative intelligence replaced them with
What AI did to the economics of a narrative attack — from troll farms to autonomous agents, and from “where are the bots?” to “where are the people?”
Who gets targeted now: members of Congress, CEOs, even shareholder votes — not just the credulous
Why most platforms stop between observe and orient, and what it takes to close the loop through decide and act
Prediction that isn’t fortune-telling, it’s reducing the number of futures that can surprise you

Wasim Khaled is co-founder and CEO of Blackbird.AI, whose Constellation platform helped define the narrative intelligence category; a computer scientist by training, he built and scaled an Inc. 500 company before turning to information warfare.
Connect with Wasim
LinkedIn: Wasim Khaled

Connect with Tyler
LinkedIn: Tyler Sweatt

Twenty years ago, a young logistics lieutenant solved an impossible field problem with a Franklin Planner, a satellite phone, and a contact who happened to be at his desk. It worked — but it ran on luck. Bill Pessin has spent his career since making sure the mission never has to. He joins Tyler Sweatt to trace the line from Army logistics to leading Salesforce’s Missionforce, and why acceleration, not just speed, is the point.
What's happening on the Second Front:
How a satellite phone and a Franklin Planner solved an impossible field problem — and why depending on luck is a system failure
Why Salesforce is the “central nervous system” of the mission enterprise, from HUMINT to workflow
How Missionforce was born from a single dinner between Marc Benioff and a combatant commander
What “acceleration” really means when moving faster through the mission is the goal, not the metric
The one piece of government friction he’d fix first if he had a magic wand

Bill Pessin is SVP of Missionforce at Salesforce and a U.S. Army veteran who has led the company’s national security business since 2014.

Connect with Bill: https://www.linkedin.com/in/billpessin/
Connect with Tyler: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tylersweatt

Every veteran gets the same advice on the way out: "your service will speak for itself." It won't. In this episode, Tyler Sweatt sits down with Kyle Eberly, Wyatt Frasier, and Max Cormier, the leadership team behind Sitreps — the recruiting firm that's become the go-to clearinghouse for veteran talent in defense tech and private equity — to give it to transitioning service members straight.
They cover:
Why civilian employers care about value and dependability, not your combat record — and how to lead with that
The difference between "signal" and "human capital," and why vets almost always need the former
Whether an MBA is still worth it (and why "getting an MBA on YouTube" is a trap)
The negotiation and entitlement mistakes that cost people offers at the one-yard line

Connect with the Sitreps Team:
Wyatt Frasier, CEO
Kyle Eberly, Chairman and CTO
Max Cormier, COO

Connect with Tyler:
LinkedIn: Tyler Sweatt

A foreign partner's payment has sat in a U.S. government account for nearly a year. The order still hasn't shipped. It's stuck in contracting. That kind of friction is exactly what Church Hutton, Chief Growth Officer at AV, has spent his career navigating: from Senate Armed Services and Appropriations staff, to Army Reserve officer, to leading growth at a company that just doubled in size by acquiring Blue Halo.
Tyler and Church dig into:
Why "cost per effect" is broken — the U.S. is shooting down $20K threats with million-dollar interceptors
Why laser weapon systems are finally moving from prototype to production after decades of false starts
The historical parallel between the Army's interwar cavalry branch and today's Pentagon modernization fights
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Church Hutton has spent over two decades moving between Capitol Hill, uniformed service, and defense industry leadership, most recently steering growth at AV through its transformation into a full-spectrum autonomous systems company.
Connect with Church
LinkedIn: Church Hutton

Connect with Tyler
LinkedIn: Tyler Sweatt