EOD Gear at DIBX 2026 — The Defense Industrial Base Accelerator
August 25–27, 2026 · Pennsylvania Convention Center · Philadelphia, PA · Event Recap
EOD Gear founder and CEO Steve Cassidy attended the inaugural Defense Industrial Base Accelerator (DIBX), hosted by the Department of War's Office of Industrial Base Policy. DIBX brought requirement owners, solution providers, and investment leaders under one roof — program offices, interagency partners, allied delegations, and private capital — focused on supply chain resilience, manufacturing capacity, and scaling proven capability.
After Action Report: Palmer Luckey and the Hon. Michael Cadenazzi at DIBX 2026
By Steve Cassidy, Founder & CEO, EOD Gear — US Navy EOD (former)
Palmer Luckey in conversation with the Hon. Michael Cadenazzi — DIBX 2026, Philadelphia. Photo: Steve Cassidy, from the room.
I spent day one of DIBX in a room full of program officers, primes, and investors listening to Palmer Luckey, the founder of Anduril, in conversation with the Hon. Michael Cadenazzi. I've sat through a lot of defense conference keynotes. This one I took notes on. What follows is my after-action report — my paraphrase of the arguments made, not a transcript — and I'm writing it down because most of what he said, the defense industrial base needs to hear more than once.
Luckey opened with how he got here: leaving Silicon Valley for defense after watching Big Tech's dependence on China collide with national security work — Google walking away from Project Maven being the moment that crystallized it. His read on that era was blunt: the ethical objections were often cover for deeper commercial bets on China. You can agree or disagree with that framing. From where I sat, the room mostly nodded.
The heart of the talk — and the part I'll be repeating for years — was about manufacturing. Luckey argued you should design for the industrial base America actually has: high school machine shops, car factories, tractor plants — not just for your own elite in-house capability. He described deliberately over-building landing gear tolerances so the part could be made almost anywhere, trading a sliver of performance for the ability to scale production across the whole country. Then he made the WWII point most people get wrong: we didn't win because we repurposed car factories. We won because we designed tanks and bombers to match what those factories could already build. As a guy who machines parts in Franklin, Tennessee, I heard that differently than most of the room. That's not theory to me. That's Tuesday.
He was just as direct about vertical integration — the thing every defense startup brags about. His position: it's a SpaceX and Tesla halo effect, and it's mostly backwards. Anduril outsources processes like anodizing, holds tolerances loose enough that fifty shops can quote a part, and keeps two to four competing suppliers on every component. Vertical integration, in his words, should be the exception — a sign of design failure — not the default flex. That's a founder of a multi-billion-dollar defense company telling the industry its favorite trophy is a liability.
On contracts, he argued for building second-, third-, and fourth-vendor provisions and IP step-in rights into agreements now, before a war forces it — so the government can scale a design even if the original company can't. And he didn't spare the certification regimes: decades-old specs and regulatory categories that, in his telling, effectively criminalize routine testing and development.
The story that stuck with me most was the supply chain one. A Korean supplier — an ally, a company that had encouraged the relationship — cut Anduril off under Chinese sanctions pressure. His conclusion: even allied private-sector supply chains don't hold under Chinese economic leverage. Source domestically wherever you can; where you can't, back the reliance with real security guarantees, the way we've protected overseas oil infrastructure for decades. He cited billions in current US government investment in rare earths and critical minerals as evidence the government has reached the same conclusion.
He closed on culture: creative, informal persistence unlocks industrial capacity that bureaucracy won't — humanize the ask. And he kept returning to a rhetorical test I liked: what would Washington or Franklin think of a two-year review cycle? Speed as the American tradition; delay as the deviation.
I walked out of that room with a full notebook and one overriding thought: everything he described — domestic sourcing, designing for producibility, distributed American manufacturing capacity — is the argument for why companies like ours exist. I didn't need convincing. But it's good to hear it said from the main stage.
Why We Were There
The theme of DIBX 2026 was Revolutionizing Defense Investment — connecting capital to capability. EOD Gear is the capability side of that equation: a vertically integrated, SBA Certified SDVOSB defense manufacturer in Franklin, Tennessee with an office serving the Redstone Arsenal community in Huntsville, Alabama.
What we brought to the industrial base conversation:
• In-house manufacturing — HAAS CNC machining, additive manufacturing, custom foam, and laser engraving under ISO 9001:2015
• Energetic manufacturing licensure — ATF FFL Type 10 and FEL Type 20, producing Pan disrupter ammunition and dearmer systems domestically
• Custom Off The Shelf™ (New COTS) — bridging fixed commercial products and fully custom engineering for rapid fielding
• FPV and drone payload components — Safe and Arm Devices (SAD/ESAD) supporting precision strike and operator safety — along with 3D-printed Luneburg lens radar reflectors for decoy drone applications, printed in Franklin
• Compliance stack primes can build on — GSA Schedule GS-07F-148GA, ITAR registered, CMMC2 compliant, Berry Compliant supply, CAGE 6VW15
Met Us at DIBX?
If we talked in Philadelphia — or you didn't catch us and want to pick up the industrial base conversation — use our contact form and reference DIBX. Every submission is logged and answered in writing.
Next stops on the World Tour: the IABTI Region VII Conference in Lisbon, September 6–9, and the Explosive Ordnance Seminar Europe in Rome, September 22–24, where Steve presents “New COTS™: Custom Off The Shelf™ — Accelerating Innovation from Concept to Capability.”
Doing homework first? Start at the Defense Manufacturing Knowledge Center or Government & Defense Sales for our full corporate and capabilities data.
Steve Cassidy is a former US Navy EOD Technician and the 2026 SBA Small Business Person of the Year for Tennessee. The story of building EOD Gear from garage startup to defense manufacturer is in his book, Green Football.