MICRO JOURNEYS PODCAST
About Dan Marrujo
Daniel Marrujo is a former Chief Strategy Officer and former Director of the Office of Research and Technology Applications (ORTA) at the Defense Microelectronics Activity (DMEA).
Mr. Marrujo began his career at Raytheon Missile Systems in Tucson, AZ., developing missile guidance systems for their advanced programs. He then moved to DMEA, in his hometown of Sacramento, CA., working for the Trusted Integrated Circuit (IC) program office. In conjunction with working on the Trusted IC program, he began working towards the development of DMEA’s reliability capabilities and was selected to lead the National High Reliability Electronics Virtual Center (HiREV).
Mr. Marrujo also established the NRO’s VS&E program which has executed a number of solutions protecting National Security. As a subject matter expert, he has provided his technical expertise in multiple DARPA, IARPA and National Security Space programs. His focus areas are Microelectronics Obsolescence, State of the Art Microelectronics Acquisition, State of the Practice Microelectronics Sustainment, Advanced Packaging, Supply Chain Risk Management, Semiconductor Reliability, Semiconductor Reverse Engineering and Semiconductor Radiation Effects.
In 2016, Mr. Marrujo was selected as DMEA’s Chief Strategy Officer, directly supporting the DMEA directorate. In this position, Mr. Marrujo works with DMEA senior leadership to define and represent the integrated DMEA message and strategic path forward for future engagements.
Latest Episodes
In this episode of Micro Journeys Inside Access, host Daniel Marrujo sits down with Colonel Keagan McLeese, call sign “Waldo”, commander of the 9th Reconnaissance Wing and Beale Air Force Base, recorded just two days before McLeese hands over command and flies his final mission as an Air Force pilot. The conversation traces his path from a teenager earning his private pilot’s license to the cockpit of the F-15 Eagle and F-22 Raptor, the origin of his call sign, and his philosophy on leadership forged through two decades of fighter pilot debriefs. From there, the discussion widens to Beale’s role in America’s power projection mission and the technology now reshaping how the Air Force fights.
That technology is Collaborative Combat Aircraft — semi-autonomous drone wingmen designed to fly alongside manned fighters, expand the “magazine,” and feed real-time intelligence back to the pilot in command. As artificial intelligence takes on a larger role in life-and-death decisions in the air, the conversation turns to a pointed question: how much authority should a machine actually have, and who stays responsible for pulling the trigger?
McLeese’s answer is direct: CCA platforms are built to be semi-autonomous, not autonomous, meaning a human pilot must still issue the final “consent to kill” before any hostile aircraft is engaged, preserving human judgment at the center of an increasingly AI-driven battlespace.
In this episode of Micro Journeys Inside Access, host Daniel Marrujo takes viewers inside one of the most quietly powerful demonstrations at African Lion 2026 in Tan Tan, Morocco. Joined by Staff Sergeant Thalia Gonzalez, Master Sergeant Michael Patterson, and Airman First Class Caleb Hilton, Daniel gets an up-close look at the Wave Relay MPU-5, a compact networking and radio device configured to run real-time multilingual voice translation inside the MC Hammer edge-computing environment. What begins as a hardware introduction quickly becomes a live demonstration that reframes what battlefield communication can look like when technology removes the language barrier entirely.
The episode digs into one of the most persistent friction points in multinational military operations: the interpreter bottleneck. When coalition forces operate across language lines, the speed of the mission has historically depended on the availability of a human interpreter. That single dependency can introduce delays of hours, creating a vulnerability not in firepower or logistics, but in communication itself. Daniel and his guests explore how that problem compounds in fast-moving, unforeseen field environments where waiting is not an option.
The Wave Relay MPU-5, operating within the MC Hammer edge-computing stack, solves this by converting voice to text, translating it in the cloud, and returning it as audio in the recipient’s native language, in real time, with no proximity limit, and protected by dual-layer AES-256 encryption.
In this episode of Micro Journeys Inside Access, host Daniel Marrujo sits down with Chief Warrant Officer 4 Eric Barker on the ground at African Lion 2026 in Morocco for an unfiltered look at one of the most capable reconnaissance tools in the U.S. military’s current arsenal. What started as Daniel spotting a drone descending from a ship in the ocean turned into an exclusive walkthrough of the Quantum Vector AI drone — a vertical takeoff and landing reconnaissance platform built for intelligence gathering in the most demanding and unpredictable operational environments on earth.
CW4 Barker breaks down a system that most people will never encounter up close. The Quantum Vector AI is not a concept or a prototype — it is an active, field-deployed reconnaissance drone with a standard range of ten kilometers, an extended range of up to sixty kilometers depending on antenna configuration, and a flight ceiling of thirteen thousand feet. It carries both daytime and infrared cameras, requires no runway to launch, and can be operated from a laptop and a controller that looks closer to consumer gaming hardware than military equipment. In environments where speed, flexibility, and discretion are everything, those capabilities represent a significant shift in how ground forces gather and share battlefield intelligence.
The Quantum Vector AI addresses one of the most persistent challenges in modern military operations — giving commanders and operators real-time visual awareness of a battlefield without the infrastructure constraints that have historically limited reconnaissance assets.
