Geopolitical tensions — mines in the Strait of Hormuz, threats on the Bab el-Mandeb, undersea cable tapping, oil pipeline explosions — illustrate that warfare is becoming more distributed, autonomous, and asymmetric, and the U.S. military's historical investment in expensive centralized systems is not enough to fight future conflicts. ✦ AI generated
Ulysses founder · a16z Podcast · 2026-08-05 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 2:38
There's so many things changing in the oceans a lot due to this new order of geopolitics that we're seeing coming out. Whether it's mines being placed in the Strait of Hormuz and Iran being unable to find them again or threats on the Bab el-Mandeb or tapping of undersea cables or oil pipelines getting exploded. But this isn't anything new for people that have been working on the sea for years. The nature of warfare is fundamentally changing. It's becoming more distributed, more autonomous, less centralized. And the investments that the United States military has made in exquisite systems over the last 50 years, while they have been important, they are simply not sufficient to fight the conflicts of the future. Warfare is trending increasingly asymmetric where small cheap things can be used to take out very high value assets. This is what we saw in Ukraine. This is going to happen in the ocean. You need to make things cheaper. You need drones. You need unmanned systems. The maritime domain is just becoming more and more important.
verbatim transcript · starts at 2:38
2:34mines have been removed? Well, yes. According to an American technology company, the company is called Ulysus, and it says it's created drones that not only can detect these mines, but more importantly can disarm them. >> There's so many things [music] changing in the oceans a lot due to this new order of geopolitics that we're seeing coming out. Whether it's mines being placed in the straight of Hormuz and
2:58Iran [music] being unable to find them again or threats on the Babel Manda or tapping of undersea cables or oil pipelines getting exploded. But this isn't anything new for people that have been working on the sea for years. The nature of warfare is fundamentally changing. It's becoming more distributed, more autonomous, [music] less centralized. And the investments that the United States military has made in exquisite systems over the last 50
3:23years, while they have been important, [music] they are simply not sufficient to fight the conflicts of the future. [music] >> There's so many things that are happening in the ocean that often enough go unnoticed. But now, [music] because they're, you know, raising oil prices, they're actually getting noticed in the news. The sea is starting to get its time in the sun, you could say. Warfare is trending increasingly
3:46asymmetric where small cheap things can be used to take out very high value assets. This is what we saw in Ukraine. This is going to happen in the ocean. You need to make things cheaper. You need drones. You need unmanned systems. The maritime domain is just becoming more and more important. Jamie was [music] walking with one of his friends who was doing seaggrass restoration and this was off the coast
4:15of Scotland. [music] So you can imagine stormy weather, horrible rain, everything. And essentially the process for doing seaggrass restoration is you pick up [music] a handful of seeds and chuck them off the side of a boat. The initial kind of nugget of a thought there was that we could mechanize this. So we started out the company by building these attachments [music] that were meant to go down and plant