The Little North Carolina Defense Summit That Bets Against the Slideshow
Meridian Forge: where claims meet reality
Between June 11-13, the small town of Southern Pines in North Carolina hosts one of the world’s most exclusive mil-tech conferences. UFN will be there—and you can still join, if you are up for the challenge of being in a room full of mil-tech pioneers.
ODESA—Southern Pines, North Carolina is not the kind of place to which defense contractors usually flock. It’s a front-porch sitting kind of town, and a golfer’s haven. There is no convention center, no airport hotel with a ballroom that smells like recycled air and lukewarm ambition. What there is, about a dozen miles up the road, is Fort Bragg, home to U.S. Army Special Operations Command. And that proximity, it turns out, is the best argument to place an exclusive, highly results-driven conference in the pines.
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That is why Meridian Forge, a joint project of two in-the-know defense and intel institutions, will set up shop in Southern Pines from June 11–13. Its concept is simple: Bring together one hundred people of the best and brightest people in defense. No cameras. No livestream. Chatham House Rule throughout. If you are looking for a badge lanyard and a tote bag full of brochures, this is not your event. If you are a founder who has never had a real operator tell you why your prototype would get someone killed, it might be the most valuable three days of your year.
We at UFN know this because the organizing team of Meridian Forge have been keen supporters of Ukrainian victory—and are often in country.
Good mil-tech companies routinely fail to penetrate defense markets not because their tech is weak, but because the ecosystem punishes newcomers who don’t know the bureaucratic language.
The defense conference circuit has a problem most people inside it are too polite to name: They are more about theatrics than actual progress, with their panels curated into inoffensiveness and their vocabulary being more about classic consultant speak (“paradigm shift!”) than naming things as they are. Everyone’s selling. Nobody’s accountable. And the people who actually field systems in contested environments are usually somewhere else entirely.
The founding team is made up exactly out of the people who you would trust in the field.
Meridian Forge is an explicit bet against all of that. The conference is organized by Atlas Special Projects and the Cipher Brief.
The Cipher Brief is a platform for former CIA, NSA, and military principals writing for the policymakers and operators still inside the national security establishment. Their recent gala dinner in DC honored Sir Richard Moore, former chief of MI6, among others.
Atlas Special Projects bills itself as a bridge between serious technology companies and the defense world’s notoriously slow, opaque procurement machinery. Their pitch: good technology companies routinely fail to penetrate defense markets not because their technology is weak, but because the ecosystem of regulatory, cultural, and bureaucratic parts, is designed in ways that favor incumbents and punish newcomers who don’t know the language. Atlas positions itself as the translator and the navigator.
The founding team is made up exactly out of the people who you would trust in the field: Joey Gagnard spent the last 20 years around Special Operations Command and intelligence, including more than a decade in the military itself. Today, among other things, he is director of field operations for Swarmer, the first Ukrainian defense firm to go public on Nasdaq in a soaring March debut.
Brandon Cooper brings two-plus decades in government contracting including senior work at SOCOM. Dan Weidman ran contracting for SOCOM and managed acquisition portfolios before going private. Phil Waymon did two decades of Special Operations work across the Middle East, Europe and North Africa. These are people who understand, at a granular level, why good technology dies in the gap between prototype and procurement, because they have watched it happen, and in some cases had to work around the consequences in the field.
The format is worth examining closely. The conference opens with a social evening at the Jefferson Inn on June 11, the kind of dinner where the real conversations happen. June 12 moves into panels and breakouts at the Sunrise Theater in downtown Southern Pines, covering combat medical care, national-security investing, and AI in defense.
Then June 13 does something most conferences are still too afraid to do: It goes outside. A drone competition and live vendor demonstrations at Tough Stump Technologies in Carthage, North Carolina, about 20 minutes drive from Southern Pines. There, claims will meet reality.
A system that looked elegant in a slideshow now has to perform in front of people who have spent careers learning to read the difference between a product that works and a product that merely looks like it does. It is easy to sound credible at a podium. It is harder when someone is asking why it failed on the third run, or pointing out that your control interface would be unusable with gloves on.
Meridian Forge is shaping up to be the rare conference where the friction is real, the feedback is honest, and the work starts before you leave.
But the details do not stop here. Even the conference guest setup itself is deliberately engineered:
one-third builders—founders and technical leads working on next-generation defense technology.
one-third funders—investors with a genuine national-security thesis, not tourist capital chasing a hot sector.
one-third operators—people who have actually fielded systems where failure carries real consequences.
That ratio ensures that everyone leaves the conference with contacts made and knowledge gained.
The media partnerships reinforce the same intent. The Cipher Brief, one of the most credible national-security platforms in Washington, built around invitation-only conversations rather than traffic-chasing headlines, is a partner. And so are we, Under Fire News.
As a Ukraine-focused outlet covering battlefield reality rather than acquisition theater we know our way around technology and defense strategy. Russia’s war on Ukraine has become the world’s most intensive live laboratory for drone warfare, electronic countermeasures, and the unglamorous science of keeping systems functional under conditions nobody fully anticipated.
Meridian Forge is shaping up to be the rare conference where the friction is real, the feedback is honest, and the work starts before you leave, making you part of a community of people that actually want to be at the forefront of military strategy and technology.
So, if you build, fund, or field defense technology and want a room built for substance rather than theater, apply for Meridian Forge before the doors close (and they’re almost closed already!).
Key Details
Event: Meridian Forge, an invitation-only defense technology summit for people building, funding and fielding next-generation defense capability.
Date: June 11–13, 2026.
Location: Southern Pines, North Carolina, with the main venue at the Sunrise Theater and demo day at Tough Stump Technologies in nearby Carthage.
Attendance: Limited to 100 participants.
Organized by: Atlas Special Projects, which positions itself as a defense-innovation bridge between emerging technology companies, growth partners and national-security markets.
Media partners: The Cipher Brief and UFN / Under Fire News.
Who should apply: Defense-tech founders, investors, operators, program managers and serious builders working on drones, autonomy, AI, combat medicine, tactical systems or field integration.
Registration: Attendance is application-only through the Meridian Forge request form.
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UFN Daily Notebook—
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Kyiv Calm and Carry On—Kyiv residents are greeting Moscow’s latest threats by keeping on with daily life, without panic. After Russia warned it would launch “systematic strikes” on the Ukrainian capital and urged foreign diplomats to leave, people in Kyiv described the threat as ugly but familiar: another round of Kremlin pressure in a city that has already lived through years of missile and drone attacks. Embassies also showed no sign of leaving, while EU Ambassador Katarina Mathernova dismissed the Russian warning as “a masterpiece of hypocrisy.”
