When Ché Bolden took command of Marine drone squadrons, he found out the aircraft were transmitting in the clear. His words: “If you went to Radio Shack and bought yourself a receiver, you could receive what we were transmitting.” These were active military UAS in operational theaters. Broadcasting unencrypted.
Ché spent 26 years in the Marine Corps — F-18 combat pilot, TOPGUN graduate, and eventually one of the first fighter pilots to command Marine drone squadrons. When fighter pilots took over from the intelligence community that had originally managed the systems, they found the security hadn’t kept pace with the capability. That experience shapes everything else in this conversation.
The episode covers why cyber risk is inherent to every unmanned system (they’re discombobulated cockpits: command and data living in the electromagnetic spectrum), how modern adversaries are shifting the attack surface from command links to autonomous source code, and why creating a dedicated Cyber Force is the same structural mistake as Space Force — it gives every other service permission to stop owning the problem. Ché also describes every Uber in Kenya routing through a Chinese guidance system, why the fastest way to find your security gaps is to hand your system to a disgruntled E3-E5 for 30 days, and what he’s building through the Interastra Institute to open up the business of space.
Ché is CEO of The Charles F. Bolden Group and Executive Chair of the Interastra Institute. He retired from the Marine Corps in 2019 as a Colonel.
Topics Discussed
- Military UAS and unencrypted transmissions in operational theaters
- Drones as discombobulated cockpits: why cyber risk is inherent to every unmanned system
- The shifting attack surface from command links to autonomous source code
- Why a dedicated Cyber Force repeats the Space Force structural mistake
- Chinese guidance infrastructure embedded at the consumer-app layer
- The E3-E5 principle: hand your system to a disgruntled junior enlisted for 30 days
- Complexity is not security: the Trojan Horse problem
- From drone squadrons to the business of space via the Interastra Institute