Redefining the Perimeter: AFWERX Taps PSG and Zignal for Base Defense

AUSTIN, Texas – September 28, 2026 – In the modern era of expeditionary warfare, waiting for a perimeter alarm to sound often means an adversary is already within striking distance. Recognizing this vulnerability, the Department of the Air Force is looking beyond traditional concrete barriers and chain-link fences to secure its most remote assets. Through its AFWERX innovation arm, the military branch has awarded a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I contract to a unique pairing of technology firms: Prometheus Security Group Global (PSG) and Zignal Labs.

Valued at $74,292, the Open Topic award funds a critical feasibility study aimed at merging physical edge security with vast streams of publicly available information. The initiative seeks to evaluate how PSG’s portable, Zero Trust physical security technology stack can integrate with Zignal Labs’ multi-modal open-source intelligence (OSINT) capabilities. If successful, the project will provide military security forces with predictive threat indicators, fundamentally shifting the paradigm of force protection from reactive barrier defense to proactive, intelligence-driven early warning.

Rethinking the Perimeter: From Meters to Miles

For decades, military base defense has relied on deep physical standoff distances. Main operating bases were fortified with massive perimeters, clear-zones, and heavily guarded entry control points designed to isolate critical assets from direct assault. However, modern strategic shifts, particularly the Air Force's Agile Combat Employment (ACE) doctrine, are rendering these legacy fortresses obsolete.

Under ACE, the Air Force is increasingly dispersing its operations into clusters of contingency locations, austere airstrips, and even civilian regional airfields. These forward operating sites severely lack physical standoff. Runways often abut civilian neighborhoods or dense terrain, and setting up heavy fencing is logistically impossible for agile units operating under rapid 24- to 72-hour deployment cycles.

"Force protection is a standoff problem, and everything we've built for fifty years buys standoff in meters," said Thomas E. Segars Jr., Director of Strategic Security Programs at PSG and a retired U.S. Air Force colonel. "This effort allows us to explore how we buy standoff in time, from a domain with no fence line. Fusing trusted detection at the resource with indicators across the open information environment means the protection envelope no longer ends where the installation or resource does. That matters most where we have the least terrain but need to launch sorties—dispersed, expeditionary locations."

The integration aims to operationalize publicly available information at the tactical edge. Kinetic operations against dispersed garrisons are almost always preceded by digital signatures: local chatter on unencrypted channels, cell phone imagery of runway activity posted to social media, or unauthorized drone spotting. By feeding structured OSINT into command nodes like the Base Defense Operations Center, forces can intercept hostile surveillance long before a physical breach occurs.

Zero Trust Meets Open Source at the Tactical Edge

Merging unclassified internet chatter with highly secure, classified military networks presents a formidable engineering hurdle, particularly at austere airstrips operating in contested electronic warfare environments. These remote locations frequently suffer from denied, disrupted, intermittent, and limited-bandwidth (DDIL) communications, making it impossible to run cloud-intensive data models directly on the runway.

To solve this, the proposed architecture divides the computational workload. Heavy data enrichment—such as large language model-driven narrative clustering and computer vision—occurs at cloud or regional command hubs. The system ingests, filters, and validates multi-modal information across text, imagery, and video to identify geographic landmarks or hostile intent. Only compressed, cryptographically signed alert tokens are pushed down to the physical edge.

“The indicators which precede a threat often emerge well beyond the physical perimeter. This Phase I effort will evaluate how fusing open source intelligence together with physical security sensor data can give security forces a more complete operational picture of activity developing around mission-defined areas of interest,” said Chad Lawson, SVP of Revenue and Strategic Partnerships at Zignal Labs and a retired Master Sergeant with USASOC. “The goal is to extend the warning window, reduce noise, and give security forces more time and context to act across both garrison and deployed missions.”

At the physical edge, PSG provides the crucial hardware-rooted Zero Trust architecture. Traditional perimeter intrusion detection systems often rely on unauthenticated IP networks, leaving remote camera feeds and radar nodes vulnerable to spoofing or interception. The Austin-based company counters this by embedding cryptographic micro-controllers directly into sensors and edge panels, verifying the origin and integrity of every telemetry packet. Their Universal Field Panels utilize a Modular Open Systems Approach, allowing them to ingest data from third-party ground-based radars and thermal cameras while maintaining strict data pedigree.

This hardware-level verification ensures that when open-source alerts are fused with tactical physical sensors, the resulting operational picture is entirely authenticated, bridging the gap between unclassified public data and sensitive military response networks without introducing cyber vulnerabilities.

Fast-Tracking Innovation: The AFWERX Dual-Use Pipeline

While a $74,292 contract might appear microscopic within the Pentagon's massive procurement budget, it represents a highly calculated strategy by AFWERX to accelerate defense innovation. The SBIR Open Topic program functions as a low-friction entry point, utilizing a rapid three-month cycle designed specifically to pair complementary commercial technologies and solve niche operational hurdles.

This Phase I award acts as a catalytic options contract. By successfully completing the feasibility study and securing a Department of the Air Force customer memorandum, the two companies can compete for Phase II funding, which typically ranges from $1.25 million to $1.65 million for prototype development. From there, the pipeline opens up to Tactical or Strategic Funding Increases, which can yield up to $30 million in matched private and government capital. Ultimately, federal SBIR law grants awardees Phase III sole-source procurement rights, allowing the military to bypass lengthy open competition for follow-on production.

This acquisition model allows the Pentagon to assemble "synthetic prime contractors" from agile mid-tier firms, challenging the dominance of traditional defense conglomerates. The competitive landscape for edge security has historically been divided between pure-play OSINT providers, who treat threat detection as a dashboard analytics problem, and legacy hardware primes, who view defense strictly through the lens of concrete barriers and fence-line sensors. Even modern disruptors in the defense tech space often require proprietary sensor towers and closed communication networks.

In contrast, this new collaboration leverages an open architecture. It wraps legacy government-off-the-shelf and commercial-off-the-shelf sensors in a zero-trust cryptographic wrapper while treating social and narrative indicators as literal tripwires deployed miles ahead of the physical base.

By incentivizing this kind of dual-use technology convergence, AFWERX is not just funding a software integration; it is actively reshaping how the military conceptualizes base defense. As the Air Force continues to adapt to the realities of agile, dispersed combat, the ability to buy time through intelligence will prove just as critical as the ability to deploy concrete and steel.