Chief Executive Officer, Exiger
CARMAKERS Drafted-Exiger’s Brandon Daniels says it’s an economic win. GisermanGroup Gets YOU Noticed
CARMAKERS DRAFTED The nation's automakers are being drafted into helping restock defense supplies exhausted by the Iran ...
About Brandon Daniels
Brandon Daniels, CEO of Exiger, appeared at the Pennsylvania Defense & Innovation Summit in July 2025 and on The Alex Marlow Show in August 2025. He described Exiger as an advanced AI development company that applies artificial intelligence to supply chain and procurement, particularly for military acquisition and contested logistics. Daniels stated that most companies are not responsible for the vast majority of their production and that AI-powered supply chain mapping is used to identify single-source dependencies and reduce reliance on foreign suppliers. During the appearances, Daniels discussed Pennsylvania's role in the defense industrial base, noting that the state hosts Tobyhanna Army Depot and produces 52% of U.S. powdered metals capabilities. He also mentioned that China imposed export controls on antimony, gallium, and germanium in August 2024, and said these minerals can be extracted from spent coal waste and fly ash. Daniels estimated that securing the Strait of Hormuz could yield "a hundred billion dollars."
Transcript (6 segments)
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Connell0:02
Planes, tanks and guns. And now the Pentagon, indeed, reportedly is looking to press automakers into service again to take a larger role in weapons manufacturing. Warning Iran and arms shipments to Ukraine of depleted U.S. stockpile. So Brandon Daniels joins us to talk more about this. He is the CEO of the supply chain technology company Exiger, which does do some work itself with the federal government. And I don't just... Interesting to go back and think about now versus then, and think about even from the practical point of view when these companies could get into that type of a work order. Your general impressions on that story that was in the Journal today.
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Brandon Daniels0:39
Yeah, it that. It's good to see. Connell, thank you. So this story is interesting. And the story is interesting because the military is taking efforts to expand the defense industrial base, right? And in the United States, the defense industrial base since the early '90s has been dwindling. Our capability to make some of the components, parts, or largest weapon systems like the Abrams, the Bradley, you know, the things that the ground combat systems that we rely on even in Ukraine. They're using some of our ground combat systems. You remember you had me on when I actually went to Ukraine and went to the front lines. Saw the use of our technology. There's just a minute of those capabilities is very difficult right now. It's difficult because it requires special processes and manufacturing. Connell, like so there's things like magnesium castings, iron castings, and a lot of cases, you may have one to three companies in the entire United States that is what's called AS9100 qualified, so qualified to make those parts and actually has the capacity to scale. And so we have like these really significant points and bottlenecks right throughout the entire broader defense industrial base that the Pentagon is trying to stall and stall.
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Connell2:16
By actually gearing up these auto manufacturers to jump in the fight. But there are a bunch of hurdles, not to mention certification and changing production lines which can take a long time. Yeah. So they're kind of practical hurdles. There might be political hurdles too, because when you say defense industrial base, I think of the defense industrial complex. And we played a clip from President Eisenhower right before he left office, like just a few days before he left office in January of '61, who brought that phrase to the top of, you know, our list of things we should be thinking about in his mind. And of course, he had the credibility to do from his days as General Eisenhower. And got to be careful and people are going to criticize again when they have to. If it's went down this road, Brandon, say, well, this is people just trying to make money off war and all that kind of thing. What, how would you answer that? Or would you answer that?
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Brandon Daniels3:08
So I think Chairman... Workers at its best. And one of my conversations with him said, you can have defense and you can have a budget, but if you don't have hard effect, if you don't have defense, your budget and your economic plan don't matter. And I actually agree with that, right? The defense industrial base is actually much bigger and much broader now because if you think about, you know, dual-use technologies, AI, artificial intelligence like ours, it powers the way that we actually analyze parts to determine whether or not additive manufacturing can be used to produce that. We helped the Army and several of the other services plan and forecast how they're actually going to spare parts and sustain and build their weapons platforms. Like every day, I come pretty much all of us are part of the defense industrial base.
Because we all support critical infrastructure, because we all support planning and management, managing components and systems. And so the defense industrial base, it's America's ability to ramp when there is a call to actually produce some of these weapon systems or to restore our critical infrastructure to being made. Deep was the other thing, Connell. And Iran right now in the conflict in Israel, the United States... I mean, Iran is engaged in really complex economic warfare. When they bombed the Ras Laffan facility in Qatar, so that, you know, stopped Qatar from aiding and working there with Iran. They bombed because they knew it would put pressure on Taiwan and South Korea from a semiconductor manufacturing perspective, right? They knew that the United States couldn't manufacture that capacity for that immediately. So that was to create economic and diplomatic pressure on the United States. So like the independence of supply chain is also now national security. So I think that there's going to be no unraveling this. Those automakers are necessary.
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Connell5:42
That's interesting. Not many people... many companies can do it at scale, to your earlier point. All right, Brandon, thank you as always. We always appreciate.