Justin Call is the co-founder and CEO of Modovolo, a local startup that is launching the Lift, a modular drone platform that can integrate a wide array of specialized payloads, with long flight time, and at a price orders of magnitude less than anything on the market.
We at Modovolo have a certain admiration for headlines that go big on hyperbole. Mostly because we like to click them.
There is a bit of a problem, though. That hyperbole tends to be a bit overblown and readers tend to roll their eyes.
But that is not the case when it comes to headlines like: “The U.S. Army Sounds the Alarm” and “US Adversaries Gain Competitive Edge” and “Modern Warfare Changing Faster than US Defense Systems Can Keep Up.”
We take those kinds of headlines seriously. Because we live in Upstate New York — and Upstate New York is not about hyperbole.
Well, not all the time.
You may remember reading on syracuse.com, “Why Syracuse, Upstate NY are the Tomorrow Land of the new drone universe.” You are now thinking: “Wow, these guys are crushing the hyperbole. And they have gotten lazy and lame with their titles.”
It’s a fair point. But we have a long history of shamelessly promoting Upstate NY with even more over-the-top language and even lazier and lamer titles, such as the article we published in UAV Commercial News titled, “Why Upstate NY is the Center of the Drone Universe.”
So, when Secretary of the Army Daniel Driscoll recently went on a diatribe at the annual conference of the Association of the United States Army (AUSA, an influential nonprofit advocating for soldiers) about how our defense systems are broken, we naturally started thinking about how Upstate New York has already been “unbreaking” those defense systems. And that’s not hyperbole.
In his diatribe, Driscoll didn’t pull any punches.
“Since the end of the Cold War, our system’s priorities shifted from combat effectiveness to jobs and profits. And I’ll just be blunt here: The definition of success became taking no risks, doing absolutely nothing, and just not getting fired,” he said.
Yes, he said that. And much more. But in summary, Driscoll’s message is this: Our military is no longer as awesome as it once was.
The reason has nothing to do with our warfighters. It’s just that for many decades now, we have not had an adversary that forced us to innovate. We have been so dominant for so long.
But now that has changed, as explained by Driscoll: “Technology is rapidly and fundamentally changing our world. Our adversaries are harnessing it to change the very nature of warfare. We must change or become obsolete.”
If you are Modovolo and other companies working on uncrewed aerial systems, this is likely filling you with anxiety. China has been dramatically ramping up its military capabilities and is now promising to retake Taiwan in 2027.
That’s a problem that the world has yet to really acknowledge. Because if Taiwan’s computer chips and other electronics stop shipping, economies will stall. Badly. Including our own.
And we’re not as ready as we should be for that fight with China.
But there’s hope. And that hope is located in Upstate New York, the “Tomorrow Land” of defense technology.
What a lot of folks don’t see is that Upstate New York has an insane amount of expertise in defense technology, ranging from large multi-nationals like Saab Sensis; to local champions like Assured Information Security (AIS) and ANDRO; to a new start-up ecosystem of companies coming out of the GENIUS NY program.
And that expertise means that Upstate New York is ahead of the curve and ready to meet the challenge.
Charles Green, co-founder and CEO of AIS, based in Rome, explains: “We’re excited about Secretary Driscoll’s pivot because we at AIS have been doing exactly what he is pushing for decades: developing cutting-edge technologies that not only outpaces our adversaries but are also far less expensive.”
The “high-tech but a lower cost” mantra is a common theme.
Andy Drozd, founder and CEO of ANDRO, also based in Rome, explains: “One of the many benefits of purposefully being a smaller defense company is that we have always asked this question: How do we develop a cutting-edge RF technologies that will fundamentally improve the capabilities of the warfighter but at the same time is far less expensive?”
And the growth and importance of defense technology in the region is only getting started.
That’s because our very own GENIUS NY, the world’s largest drone business accelerator and competition, makes defense technology a key priority.
Kara Jones, Director of GENIUS NY, explains, “We look for companies that have dual-use technologies that work in the commercial and defense space. That’s now an important mandate from Secretary Driscoll to use what’s called ‘COTS,’ commercial off-the-shelf technology, to lower costs and increase capabilities at the same time.”
ResilienX and SkyfireAI are two such GENIUS NY companies.
Andrew Carter, co-founder and CEO of ResilienX, explains, “We’ve built our tech stack on the dual-use principles of safety and security, ensuring that commercial and military drone operations achieve positive mission outcomes. Commercially, we focus on safety assurance while in defense we focus the same technology on mission assurance.”
SkyfireAI represents the kind of dual-use innovation emerging from Upstate New York.
Don Mathis, co-founder and CEO of SkyfireAI, explains: “Our AI-driven platform integrates drone and sensor ecosystems into a single intelligent network capable of multi-ship coordination, data fusion and real-time decision support. By combining commercial agility with defense-grade reliability, we’re proving that American innovation can deliver autonomy that’s mission-ready today — and scalable for the challenges ahead.”
In the end, when the nation’s defense system needs a reboot, the real engine of change might be right in our backyard. From Rome to Syracuse to the Finger Lakes, Upstate New York isn’t just talking about innovation — it’s building it.
Read the full story here: Tomorrow Land, Part 2: How Upstate NY companies are ‘unbreaking’ US defenses (Guest Opinion by Justin Call) – syracuse.com