Dear Decision Maker,

I'm Travis Butson, Technical Intelligence Instructor here at Grey Dynamics.

Ahmed has given me the reins for the email this week to introduce myself, share a little about my background, and talk in detail about Grey Dynamics’ recently released Technical Intelligence Fundamentals course. ​

Experience and Passion, in equal measure.

We were all weird as kids right?

Everyone had their thing they were infatuated with, whether it was farm machinery or trains, or any one of the infinite things a child sees and just decides to obsess over.

Mine was military equipment. And I’m yet to grow out of it.

My chance to professionalise it came in my first year of university.

I was studying law. I hated it.

One day while making myself purposefully late to another law lecture, I wandered through the annual career expo.

The military recruiter clocked me immediately.

Of course I was interested, but childhood asthma made me ineligible.

So I figured a Law degree mixed with a Journalism minor would at least get me somewhere tangential to military operations.

The next 30 seconds of conversation changed the entire projection of my life.

Asthma is not a hard no. Do a respiratory test. If you pass you are eligible.

I skipped another law lecture to do it the next day.

Eligible!

The day after that I was in the recruiting office. Air Force Intelligence. I just needed a degree.

I changed my majors, International Relations and Communications, and went from falling asleep in the back of lessons on statutes, to the front seat of lectures given by people of the likes of Dr. Najibullah Lafraie, who talked us through the Arab Spring as it happened in real time.

In 2012, an opportunity arose to join the New Zealand Army. I figured a year as a grunt would be fun, and would make my application to the Air Force look a bit better.

That little manoeuvre cost me five years.

My military career, spanning from 2012 to 2026, followed a pretty consistent trend.

Whether I was sitting in a rain-filled foxhole, or a coalition headquarters, I couldn’t shake the need to argue for understanding exactly how the adversary would fight based on what they had and how it worked.

Whether it was;

• Defending air mobility aircraft against VSHORAD (Very Short-Range Air Defence) threats
• Pulling apart adversary IADS (Integrated Air Defense System) to find weaknesses
• Determining a source of advantage during an air-to-air intercept
• Exploiting Improvised rocket launchers

I consistently found myself arguing for greater effort in analysing the capability aspect of threat.

Not just knowing what the enemy has.

But analysing how those capabilities: may shape their actions, how they function, how they can be mitigated or defeated, and how their weaknesses can be exploited to gain a localised advantage.

It’s something I felt was lost behind the headlining disciplines of HUMINT, GEOINT and SIGINT, which went a long way towards telling a story of intent, or explaining what an adversary was in possession of, but lacked the ability to genuinely understand what they were capable of doing.

This brings me to Grey Dynamics

A few years ago Ahmed and I had a discussion about the future of VSHORAD.

How are people going to kill drones?

We discussed jamming, and electronic warfare, and the extremes of technological solutions.

The key point here being that a lack of technical awareness in how people were considering the threat was the main problem.

Electronic Warfare is capable, but we can’t simply jam something and forget about it, there is a broad and vast array of;

• Counter-measures
• Counter-counter-measures
• Redundancies
• The ever present signal-to-noise ratio to consider.

And that equation is constantly evolving and adapting.

In this environment of breakneck, uncontrolled development, we can’t solely trust non-kinetic defenses, and the people on the ground won’t be able to either.

My advice would be to go looking for the supply and production chains that generate 20 to 35mm Autocannon systems and ammunition, and buy into them.

At the time the Gepard in Ukraine was proof, over time the success of Rheinmetall ammunition and Skyranger became my ongoing argument.

A TECHINT line of effort wielded to identify and exploit a business advantage. It wasn’t something I’d ever really considered as an option.

But Grey Dynamics is all about democratising intelligence, so a chance to get the skillset out there in the shape of a TECHINT course was something Ahmed and I were both very keen on.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

People assume a flare will stop an IR (infrared) missile, but a standard Magnesium-Teflon-Viton flare dispensed today won't reliably defeat any MANPADS (Man-portable air-defence systems) from the second generation or higher (the bad guys are up to Gen 4).

Simultaneously, an over reliance on complex and sophisticated technological solutions was foregoing simple, procedural mitigations that were far more cost effective, accessible, and could be implemented immediately.

So that became the goal of the Technical Intelligence Fundamentals Course, to shatter the illusion that technical systems, be they defensive or offensive, are in any way infallible.

And to give people the means and confidence to look at a complex or sophisticated threat system and see it as a network of interconnected, breakable components.

All of which are vulnerable in their own different ways.

Whether you are a:

• Desk Analyst for a major national intelligence agency
• Contractor
• Journalist
• NGO worker
• Investor

developing the fundamental skills to unpack threats and understand, in detail, how they and you coexist within your area of operations is extremely valuable.

That is what this course gives you.

Confidence as the key output

You don’t need a PHD in physics or mathematics to do TECHINT well.

What is far more valuable is the cunning and imagination that enables someone to identify and exploit the gaps that the engineers and scientists that did build the weapon didn’t see.

Some of the most impressive adaptations I’ve ever encountered weren’t made by Fulbright scholars.

They were dreamed up by someone cunning enough to exploit a gap no one else saw in a way no one was able to predict.

This course was designed to give you the confidence to begin this way of thinking.

To walk away from the final module, open the latest news headlines, see a missile launch or a munition strike, and know from step one how to pull it apart and exploit its functions, vulnerabilities, purpose and context, in granular detail.

Taught in a way anyone can understand (once you figure out the New Zealand accent).

I built this course to:

• Explore and discuss the critical and wider concepts of TECHINT
• Expand beyond the theory into the particulars of TECHINT’s real life application
• Cover what was missing from the WEPTECHINT courses I have completed
• Share the processes and tools that I developed throughout my career

I’m confident there is no course like this. And I know there is no course with this content.

Know your Enemy, Know his Sword

Travis Butson
​Technical Intelligence Instructor​
Grey Dynamics​
​

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