Before Smack, Andy Markoff planned wars in PowerPoint.
He was the operations officer for a special operations task force in northern Iraq during the fight for Mosul. Marine and coalition special operations teams were embedded with the Kurds, and later the Iraqis, and Andy’s job was to pull together what they were seeing on the front and figure out how to go after the ISIS network so the partner force could take the next piece of the city.
The tools were whiteboards and napkins. That got turned into a Gantt chart in PowerPoint. Every morning, SharePoint crashed trying to upload it. At the end of the night the plan went into what he calls the “special filing cabinet,” which is the trash can. For three months he slept one to two hours a night, “hopped up on energy drinks and rage.”
“There has to be a better way than this, but this is the way we have right now.”
It took him about seven years to get back to that problem.
About Andy
Andy knew he wanted to be a Marine before he got to Princeton. After graduation upon commissioning he grew frustrated by the inability to specialize. He moved from Rifle platoon to mortars, to aviation fires integration.
There, he learned that “most problems that are hard are integration problems. There’s very few problems that are worth solving that are single discipline problems.”
After he got out, he worked at Palantir, where they kept him off defense work on purpose because he was “too in the box” on the problem. Then it was off to Origin Materials, where he ran operations from Tahoe and guided in the mountains on weekends. Then Pallas Performance, a sports performance company he started with his wife.
About Smack
In fall 2023, Andy’s friend Clint was leaving the Marine Corps, and the two of them decided to go after the very problem that had been troubling them for years. Through the Palantir network they met Dan Gould, the former CTO of Tinder.
Here’s how Andy frames the problem: national leadership sets strategic goals. Units carry out tactical actions. Everyone talks about one or the other. The layer in between requires arranging all those tactical actions in space and time and tying them to strategic effects you can measure. But that layer still happens on napkins and whiteboards and in PowerPoint.
“We can’t campaign. There are no tools that exist that enable campaigning.”
So Smack builds small, domain-specific models that run on-prem in compute-constrained environments.
The harder part is the training data. LLMs learn from text. Andy’s point is that very little of what matters here is written down. How platforms, effectors, and signatures interact at scale, given a mission and a set of objectives, lives in the heads of people who have done it in combat and taught it. So Smack has to build a dataset that doesn’t exist yet, combining physics models with knowledge pulled out of those people’s heads. Andy calls the output trajectories. Some are fully synthetic. Some are hybrid, with real post-mission data filling part of the schema and synthetic data filling the variables nobody measured.
Key Takeaways
1. Sell where you’re already trusted
Smack’s leadership team were the joint fires experts a program office would have called for help anyway. “Some of the people we’ve worked with, they worked for some of us, we worked for them, we taught them, they taught us.” Andy figures he deployed with about a third of the company.
What the customer told them was basically this: we know you’re early, we know you still have to raise money and build a lot, but we’re not going to burn three to five years and hundreds of millions of dollars on someone we have to teach the problem to.
“That is the bet, is that you will figure it out because we don’t have to teach you the problem.”
They started where trust was already high.
2. Tacit knowledge often isn’t written down, but unlocks big value
Andy doesn’t think physics is the moat. “We’re not the only company in the world with physicists.” The moat is the detailed knowledge of how tactics actually work, which only exists in people’s heads. Only a select few know who to call.
Smack built a system for getting that knowledge out of heads and onto the screen. They map everything the model needs to know, down to mission and platform combinations and the tactics, formations, and procedures for each. Then they bring in weapons instructors who have done it in combat and taught it.
Domain expertise is a starting point, but the company is about making it discovering.
3. Let the customer check your work
I asked how you get a Marine Corps customer to trust a dataset you built. Andy’s answer: bring them into building it.
Some of the people in Smack’s expert network are end users under contract. They give example scenarios, audit the scenarios Smack builds, and audit the physics. On one contract, Smack opened up its physics models and spent what Andy calls “an incredibly painful six hours” going through the equations on a whiteboard with the customer’s experts.
“We’re not black boxing how the physics work.”
The customer pushed back on some of it, and Smack changed a couple of things. That’s where the trust came from.
4. Pick the first use case that gets you the next five
Smack wants to be a decision layer for warfighting. It started with fires, one of seven warfighting functions, and Andy has a good first-principles case for why.
“I’m just a really shitty weapon, right? I’m slow. I have a rifle. Sometimes I shoot it well, sometimes I don’t. But at the end of the day, I’m a platform with a launcher with munitions inside of it.”
To do fires you have to do enough sensing to close the loop, so you get part of intelligence. Fires drives maneuver. Force protection is defensive fires. And you know the logistics requirement because you’re the one creating it.
“Starting with fires buys you most of the warfighting functions.”
They built it in layers, one customer at a time. First, what the target list should be over the next three months. Then the next four days in a detailed plan. Then plan repair, when you’re executing live and nothing is going to plan. Put those together and you have campaign-level fires.
5. When building a team, not everyone wants the same thing
Smack’s growth and mission operations teams are heavy on vets. The values, here to serve and here to win, land with them right away.
The research side is different.
“You’re not gonna find someone that’s like, ‘I always wanted to do national security.’ That is actually not what a lot of the researchers we’re looking for look like. And if you limit yourself to that, you’re not gonna actually get the best talent.”
What he asks of researchers is that they’re willing to work on defense and willing to serve their teammates. What he gives them is science hard enough that they aren’t wasting part of their career.
Then he brings the two groups together the way the Marine Corps would. The LA office has an MMA coach who has cornered UFC fighters teaching four hours a day. There’s a full gym and a cold plunge on the way. When they’re in Texas, they take the team shooting. The point is to let engineers do something hard and a little scary, find out they can, and get a small taste of what the end user’s life is like.
He also turned the story from the top of this episode into a hiring filter. As a new mortar platoon commander, Andy watched rounds land way off target. His section leader, a machine gunner with a Navy Cross from Fallujah, went out and did his yelling and motivating thing, and the rounds started landing on target. His explanation: “You know, sir, even the laws of physics can be overcome with a little motivation.”
For more on Smack, visit: https://smacktechnologies.com/
Follow Andy: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andy-markoff-0b096611a/
