OPINION:
A military gun silencer costs the cash-flush Pentagon about $1,500.
Yet the component is so important to stealth missions that it became the crown jewel in a former U.S. Marine’s ownership battle. He fended off the German Defense Ministry’s bid to claim his company’s invention for its own weapons buyer, the Bundeswehr.
Gavin West, a former Marine officer who fought the Taliban and hunted al Qaeda terrorists, set out to capture the corporate world as a civilian. His startup company, Texas-based Aspis Forge Inc., is led by himself as CEO, a father-and-son duo known for their manufacturing savvy, and a German project manager, Anja Glisovic-Rosch.
Ms. Glisovic-Rosch, who serves as Aspis’ chief technology officer, is a physicist within the German defense industry, an expert in chemical/biological warfare and a military officer in the German armed forces. It is she who caught the Bundeswehr’s attention.
This fall, she reported her Aspis hiring to higher-ups. Then came Germany’s claim that her work meant the Bundeswehr owned the patent rights.
Mr. West left the Marine Corps as a captain after eight adventurous years. He made three deployments to Afghanistan in the first decade of the “War on Terror.” He commanded a scout/sniper platoon in 2004, which he said was the largest and deepest deployment of a Marine Expeditionary Unit in history. Two years later, he returned alongside Delta Force as an intelligence collector and then went back in-country, teaming up with intelligence agencies to hunt terrorists.
Years later, Germany triggered his hard-charging combat instincts.
He began protests by sending letters and contacting Capitol Hill staffers and members of Congress.
He told The Washington Times that his standoff is not just for himself and Aspis. What if other countries snatch patents on which their citizens contributed while employed by an American company?
“There are almost 47,000 Chinese H1B visa holders in the U.S., the majority of whom work in technology,” Mr. West said. “Imagine if China adopted the same position as Germany and required that each of their citizens reported technical details of emerging technologies directly to the People’s Liberation Army.”
The U.S. issues H1B visas to skilled foreigners, primarily in high-tech fields, for temporary employment. Thousands are involved in defense industry projects.
The Washington Times has reviewed correspondence between Mr. West and Bundeswehr procurement czars. The Times reached out to the German government, both at the embassy in Washington and the Bundeswehr’s press offices, but received no reply.
Ms. Glisovic-Rosch won Bundeswehr’s permission to join Aspis last year, and she was the silencer’s principal inventor. Then a German Defense Ministry bureaucrat cited a German law to tell Mr. West that the German government would exercise authority over the silencer design. In other words, Germany, a NATO ally in the midst of record arms spending, could take the Aspis’ creation and pass it to contractors.
Germany made the claim as Mr. West was trying to corral millions of investors’ dollars to start a production line in Texas.
On March 23, Mr. West fired off an appeal letter to the director of armaments, Vice Adm. Carsten Stawitzki, and he dropped some names.
“The United States trade office as well as our Senate and Congressional House Armed Services Committees are now involved in this situation,” he wrote. “This is now a senior U.S.-German political issue.”
He continued, “I will avoid attributing political motives to these threats to seize and nationalize our technology, but representatives of the U.S. government clearly see this as likely retaliation for the US Administration’s policies on trade and NATO.”
He further explained, “[Ms. Glisovic-Rosch’s] work was conducted for project specific to Aspis Forge, on her own time, separate and distinct from her work with the German Armed Forces. In short, Germany has no claim to any portion of the invention, even under applicable German law(s).”
Mr. West’s congressional contacts included Rep. Nick LaLota, a New York Republican and an old Naval Academy classmate.
Mr. West also emailed a House staffer: “We have invented a weapons suppressor that is half the weight of current ones and can be made invisible to thermal detection. The same goes for the rifle barrels we are about to start producing. These give us a decided advantage in night time ops and against drone based thermal [intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance.]”
Mr. West told The Times that his emerging company has three U.S. patents in the books and will soon submit a fourth for the suppressor. All are centered on next-generation weapons components.
“To be clear, all the work on this project was done on our time at our expense, not on the German dime or clock,” he said.
Fairly quickly in March, good news arrived. The Bundeswehr sent a letter dropping its threat to take patent ownership.
“The result of this review is that we consider your previous objections regarding the legal status of the invention to be justified. I would therefore like to confirm that the Federal Republic of Germany will not assert any rights to the invention. … I can now appreciate the reasons why you pursued this matter with such persistence and asserted your legal position.”
The notification said the government had not seen Mr. West’s letter of intent dated September until recently. He told The Times the letter had in fact been delivered to the ministry.
If officials had the letter from the start, the German ministry said, then “this escalation could have been avoided entirely.”
Mr. West told me, “I’ve never seen a German letter of surrender before.”
• Rowan Scarborough is a columnist with The Washington Times.
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