Navigating New Frontiers: A Military Tech Overhaul with Chris Kirchhoff

[00:00:08] Is our military way behind other countries in terms of using the latest technology with AI, with drones, with biotech, with cybersecurity? I think for many years it was. We know we're behind on supersonic weapons. Are we behind on AI? How did Hamas send undetected 1000 or so

[00:00:35] paragliders into Israel without Israel detecting it? Are we behind on the AI that's in sensors? Like what is going on? So with the help of Chris Kirchhoff who wrote Unit X, How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley are Transforming the Future of War, we answer these questions and more.

[00:00:58] This isn't your average business podcast and he's not your average host. This is the James Altucher Show. Let me start off by asking like, where is the US failing now? I feel like other countries

[00:01:21] are moving past us in a lot of ways with modern technology. Like we recently heard that on hypersonics the ability to send missiles at speeds of like Mach 10 is surpassing the

[00:01:34] US's ability to do it. On AI we know places like China have no ethical qualms about pursuing the most aggressive forms of AI in order to create better weapons. Like does the US have a chance in this

[00:01:49] new technological regime we're in? It sure does, but it is, I agree with you totally. It's counterintuitive. Like how have we gotten to this place where all of a sudden

[00:02:02] other nations are beating us at our own game? Like in a lot of dimensions, not only as you mentioned with like leading edge emerging technology like artificial intelligence but also potentially on the battlefield which is shocking. Ever since the end of the Second World War the United States

[00:02:22] has had sort of unquestioned conventional military superiority. But there are some reasons that have led us to this sort of astonishing juncture and there are I think some emerging answers about what to do about it. And yeah, so it's interesting to use conventional

[00:02:41] warfare. So like when I think of the military race, the weapons race, we think of nuclear weapons like oh who has better and more nuclear weapons and then it's just a sheer numbers

[00:02:52] game like who has more planes and ships and I guess in terms of planes who has faster planes and none of these things turn out to be important in terms of winning a war. Like who has

[00:03:05] more nuclear weapons doesn't make a difference in terms of who in the war and who has faster planes it turns out you know we made all these faster than the speed of sound planes like the

[00:03:16] like the F-4s, the F-104s. It doesn't really those aren't the planes that get into dogfights because now there's there's smart missiles, there's drones and so on. So it's not like these we don't make fast planes now like the U.S. doesn't make

[00:03:31] phantoms or other faster than sound planes because it's not necessary. So all of these things that were kind of measures of military superiority with conventional warfare are useless metrics now.

[00:03:44] Well, it really is true. I mean just the other day I was in a room and there was a U.S. Senator griping about the fact that the number of ships the Navy fields had gone down

[00:03:55] and of course you know that's sort of like measuring your military effectiveness by how many cavalry horses you have in the barn. I mean it's just not a relevant measure but it is important to step back

[00:04:07] in time and to realize that you know just like anything the technology that drives military superiority ebbs and flows and so at one time you know the cavalry were the dominant

[00:04:19] force of war and then around World War I you know you got mechanized tanks right that clearly prove superior and World War I was a war fought by battleships but World War II was a war won by

[00:04:33] aircraft carriers so that's another incredible transformation. And so I think that the thing to think about now like why is it that our military is no longer as dominant as it once

[00:04:46] was you know for a very long time you know that's starting probably with the end of the Cold War the first Gulf War I mean dropping bombs down you know chimneys right the U.S. had grown up this

[00:04:59] it's known as a precision strike complex that was just astonishing but that was you know in the early 1990s and our adversaries have now had more than 30 years to study how we are successful and to purpose build their militaries around ways to be able to defeat our strengths

[00:05:21] so that's part of the reason why we're arriving at this moment where all of a sudden our margins in the battlefield have eroded substantially. Yeah and I mean you well there's a couple

[00:05:34] things you mentioned in the book that I want to bring up but let's actually talk about a recent example what how did how did the Hamas send over whatever it was 1700 paragliders into

[00:05:49] Israel without Israel knowing like Israel's got if anybody's going to be ahead of us in technology it's probably going to be Israel and yet somehow or other their entire security complex was down all these paragliders came in and just raped and pillaged for the whole day and

[00:06:07] started this devastating war that's still going on how did that happen how did we not notice with our satellites Israel not notice with all of their sensors like like just a basic technology

[00:06:19] things seem to have gone wrong you know I got a chance to visit Israel the first week in June and Gaza as well and I mean first of all it's just such a tragedy because what happened on October

[00:06:30] 7th has kicked off a you know a cycle of violence that's just only spinning out wider and that you know is engulfed not only Israel and Hamas but now some of the wider Middle East and

[00:06:43] and Iran yeah Lezeman it's a really tragic situation you know moving away from a viable peace process rather than towards it and so you know that does make you look at the day what

[00:06:58] happened on October 7th as even more tragic and you know it goes to show that people that don't like each other will come up with ingenious ways to harm the other side and on October 7th

[00:07:14] it started by Hamas using quadcopters commercial quadcopters they had literally bought off Amazon drones drones cheap drones not military grade drones like drones that you and I would use to like film ourselves skateboarding or skiing and they mounted grenades to those drones and

[00:07:32] they dropped them on the generators powering the surveillance towers that looked over the border wall separating Gaza from Israel so that's how the attack started and then there were other tactical things they did that were quite unique like for instance using

[00:07:48] paragliders to drop small amounts of infantry troops across the line so so when they blew up though these the sensors on the surveillance towers using these drones yes it was basic technology but doesn't Israel have technology to hey our surveillance software just went down

[00:08:10] well you know they were pretty crafty so as I understand it they essentially took out all the surveillance towers at once so you know like that that mission impossible movie where all the

[00:08:22] security you know television go blank at the same time and you know Israel you know not you know going back to the Maginot line right this you know fortification built to essentially prevent you know the attack that happened in World War one for being successful and of course

[00:08:39] you know the Germans just drove right around it rather than going through it and that sophisticated fortification then you know three generations ago had fostered what turned out to be a very false degree of confidence that you know we're using advanced technology

[00:08:53] to protect it there's no way for this advanced technology to be defeated and of course that hubris led the Israeli military not to have troops in reserve and you know not to take a lot of

[00:09:06] basic steps that you know most militaries in that situation would have taken garden a you know hostile border so so okay so this is one example but now let's take the US even despite all the

[00:09:23] work you've put in and then is described in the book unit X where is the US still lagging or where are you worried the US is still lagging on technology should that tensions result with

[00:09:36] China or North Korea like in the book you mentioned how you even thought we were we had round the clock satellite surveillance of North Korea so we could see what they're doing and then there

[00:09:47] and who would think North Korea is technologically savvy but the reality is we can't really see them with satellites is they're covered by clouds 200 days a year and basic technology we haven't

[00:09:59] incorporated to get past that we haven't incorporated into the US military well I mean we all wish that it worked like it did in the in the movies right you know like mission impossible and James

[00:10:09] Bond where you know there's a super secret satellite that nobody knows about that swoops in to save the day but you know of course it doesn't work like that and you know there has

[00:10:21] been a real shift so you know in the book unit X we begin the story in 2016 and if you had gone up to any four star general in the US military and said I would bet you a steak dinner that

[00:10:36] in 10 years drones are going to be able to defeat tanks they would say you're on you know I'll bet you 10 steak dinners and of course you know they would have turned out to be wrong

[00:10:48] because here we are in Ukraine seeing drones you know demonstratively destroy armored vehicles and not only that but you know just a few weeks ago the Ukrainians had to withdraw from the front lines all 31 of the M1A1 Abrams battle tanks that the US had given the Ukrainian

[00:11:11] military because more than a quarter of them had been destroyed by Russian kamikaze drones I mean this is the most advanced tank in the US arsenal in the arsenal of our adversaries so I guess what I

[00:11:24] worry about now is you know no no force no four star general would would would take that bet today that a drone can't defeat an armored vehicle or a tank but if our most how do they defeat

[00:11:37] a tank by the way how does a drone defeat a tank well you know it turns out that tanks are built essentially to fight other tanks and artillery so they're armored to take strikes in particular from the sides but some of their top side parts are quite vulnerable

[00:11:57] and if you can get a smaller charge up close you might not leave the tank as a sort of smoking hole in the ground but you'll disable it from being an effective fighting vehicle so you know here

[00:12:09] again inexpensive you know drones we're talking you know a thousand or two dollars of hardware plus you know 20 bucks worth of high explosives taking out a tank that you know is a multi-million dollar

[00:12:24] armored vehicle and so you know that that leads me to ask the question are we at one of those moments right where you know in the first world war the cavalry clearly met its demise

[00:12:38] you know with the rise of the tank but you know could we be similarly today at the end of a century of mechanized warfare of man mechanized warfare and shifting into a new paradigm

[00:12:51] and if that's the case then and this is where you know we arrive at this paradox of how is that the US military got into a very different place you know we've made a heck of an investment in

[00:13:01] tanks we have a lot of them you know our allies have a lot of them we have like planes and ships that are designed to ferry tanks around the world to where where they need to go

[00:13:12] but if they arrive and they're not a viable weapon on the battlefield then we've made a massive investment in something that doesn't any longer have the combat firepower it did just

[00:13:21] a few years ago so let's say you were starting from scratch and you could you could outfit the military with any technology you want and and ramp up whatever you want for for these situations

[00:13:34] what would you do right now well uh you know some smart people in the panagina I think have some great ideas already about what direction to head and they've just started um about

[00:13:46] half a year ago or so something called the replicator initiative which is an initiative to build low-cost autonomous weapon systems so instead of building uh you know fighter jets like on the

[00:14:01] cover of our book we have the f-35 and you know that's uh you know 300 million dollar piece of equipment um start with inexpensive but still fairly capable weapon systems and use mass in other words numbers to make up for perhaps a smaller number of weapons platforms that cost

[00:14:25] a lot more and get you just a little bit more capability but but in the end could be overwhelmed by mass and so there is a directional shift in the pentagon now to embracing you know a much

[00:14:36] more autonomous distributed driven by AI set of weapon systems but this comes along with a big debate that's not only a debate in the erine of the pentagon where all the four stars have their

[00:14:49] offices along with the secretary of defense it's also a debate in congress because um it's one thing to have a consensus that yeah we should try out these new weapon systems but it's another thing to

[00:15:00] say we should probably stop buying tanks and we should probably shut down the tank plants you know and all the manufacturers in you know god knows how many states that produce them

[00:15:12] i'm right there's a whole complex here there's a political story um you know there have to be members of congress that are willing to say you know it's going to be really hard for my community

[00:15:22] to give up this plant that we've you know had for two generations cranking out tanks but i'm going to take a vote to do that to you know take a bet on the future of war

[00:15:35] it's hard yeah so so what will happen well i mean uh we'll find out right i mean this part of the story is is not yet told um but um as excited as i am as as all all of the things that defense

[00:15:55] innovation unit has accomplished particularly in shifting thinking i mean di you now has a mission that congress has actually codified in law um uh congress this year appropriated the budget of defense

[00:16:12] innovation unit to be a billion dollars which is you know that's real money right take a quick break if you like this episode i'd really really appreciate it i mean so much for me please share

[00:16:26] with your friends and subscribe to the podcast email me at alcatra gmail.com and tell me why you subscribed thanks and so let's let's describe that so so this this unit you started with your partner

[00:16:49] raj Shah started in 2016 you got 30 million dollars in funds to start off with roughly i mean it was a battle like everything with government there's there was a bureaucratic battle once you even got

[00:17:00] the approval and the job was to basically bridge this gap between silicon valley which is working on all this amazing technology and the military which had nothing what were some of the first

[00:17:13] successes of this like how did you sort of prove out that this was a good idea well i mean first of all the the military had a whole lot of stuff and it was it was pretty amazing stuff right so

[00:17:24] going back to the you know the f-35 the the fighter that's on the cover of our book unit x i mean this is like it's a flying supercomputer who that uh you know is stealthy right it has

[00:17:36] super advanced weapons it can strike targets you know well over the horizon it's supersonic i mean it's an amazing piece of hardware right it will take down any other plane in the sky with with a

[00:17:48] comfortable margin of error but the way it is produced is through a very bespoke kind of production right that the u.s grew up in the cold war and that still exists today such that

[00:18:02] the design of the f-35 the most advanced aircraft in the world was finalized in 2001 and it didn't become fully operational until 2016 15 years later and of course a lot in technology had changed in those 15 years so the whole purpose behind defense innovation unit

[00:18:22] and having the panagon uh become a part of silicon valley begin to access the consumer technology ecosystem is that that consumer technology ecosystem which is really separate i mean we have sort of two systems of production for technology here in the united states one for

[00:18:38] the military and one for everything else and that other system is faster it operates under much fewer rules it's much more free market you can do things typically for much lower costs

[00:18:50] it's much more agile and the whole goal of the office was to bring these two systems closer together i mean it's interesting because it reminds me of of both the post office and and the arguments about the the the 200 year old argument about communism versus capitalism

[00:19:09] is that basically and i'm not trying to take one side i guess i am taking a side here which is that when you have government you know planning things it doesn't work as well as when kind of

[00:19:21] the private markets you know create things and plan things like central planning doesn't work so if the government says oh we're going to need all these fighter jets 15 years from now that doesn't work as well as just kind of a bunch of venture capitalists getting together funding

[00:19:37] something and then seeing what what the market produces and delivers well it's a i mean yes of course uh but i mean the the story is more complex because these two different technology ecosystems do fit together in very meaningful ways and so if you

[00:19:53] you know grab the you know your the iphone from your from your pocket um you know about 80 percent of the technology that iphone wasn't developed by apple it was developed by darpa and other

[00:20:03] federal labs in the you know 60 70s 80s and 90s even siri started off as a as a darpa research project so there is a a synergy between these two systems so that's important to know

[00:20:17] the second thing that's important to know is that you know this this defense system of production that has you know strengths and weaknesses is is purpose built for a reason you know you can't

[00:20:31] really have a a free market per se for aircraft carrier builders right you can't go on amazon and like comparison shop it turns out there's like one maybe two companies in the world that can

[00:20:42] build you an aircraft carrier so what that means is you're not in a free market you're in a system that economists refer to as monopsony where there is one buyer and just a couple sellers

[00:20:55] so the market won't set prices you have to set prices in a different way in a way that involves cost accounting and auditing procedures that make sure the taxpayer dollars are being used fairly in building this incredibly complex technology that takes you know years to assemble and

[00:21:16] by the way it might be around for 30 40 50 years right the lifetime of the some of these platforms is is is quite impressive and so that system as you have to imagine has to run under a lot of rules

[00:21:29] and regulations and requirements that specify exactly how things should be built in advance not knowing how technology is going to change and then there's you know an army of auditors and each defense contractor has to have an accounting system that will plug into the panagons auditing

[00:21:46] system so you know in effect that creates a system not unlike a public utility where you know we all have to have electricity right can't let the free market decide that we're only going to give electricity to people in cities because there's a density of profit

[00:22:02] there that would motivate private capital to you know put up electricity wires so these two systems they do exist understandably in very different ways and you know it what happens in the in the military industrial complex isn't you know by itself crazy or without logic it's just

[00:22:24] that we're moving into a world where that other technology ecosystem that moves much faster is now gone global I mean the world is flat in the sense that you know the micro electronics market

[00:22:35] is globally distributed now so our adversaries are now able to buy a lot of the same technology the US military is you know if you go back to the Cold War we were spending a lot more money

[00:22:48] on federal research and development you sort of assume that what DARPA had in the closet was six seven eight generations more advanced than you know what what we would carry

[00:22:58] around in our pockets and now the reverse is true the you know the iPhones that we carry around in our pockets are actually far more advanced than the processor in the f35 because the consumer

[00:23:07] technology ecosystem has grown so much larger so basically this is where you guys came in again you built this this like a VC fund or you know a company to basically bridge this gap between

[00:23:22] this fast moving technology and maybe the slower moving decision makers who still need to make these decisions that only they can make because they understand what's going on in a war and but did they recognize they have to move fast like obviously they did enough to fund your

[00:23:37] operation but what happened then so you started out you're in Silicon Valley were you treated by other VCs as if you were a legit VC hey we're andreason harrow it's come to the table

[00:23:48] with us and hang out and we'll look at companies together well showing up in Silicon Valley and saying you know hi i'm i'm from the government i'm here to help uh typically doesn't get you very far

[00:24:01] although like you said there's one massive buyer there and if you could get into that food chain you're going to do very well well it's it's tricky though because even though you know the Pentagon's budget is you know 800 billion dollars a year right which is enormous

[00:24:19] and its weapons spend what it spends on technology and systems is you know like 280 billion or so you know the consumer technology market is 25 trillion dollars it dwarfs right what the

[00:24:32] Pentagon spends and not only that but uh you know until we got there if you wanted to do business with the Pentagon you had to compete for contracts under what are called the federal acquisition rules

[00:24:46] or more specifically the defense supplement of the federal acquisition rules and so if the federal acquisition rules are like the encyclopedia Britannica the defense federal acquisition rule supplement is like the size of a dictionary so you have to figure out how to master that

[00:25:02] and um you know the typical contract process for farm-based contracts you know they run typically 18 to 24 months so if you're a startup that's backed by a venture capital firm and you tell your

[00:25:17] investor you know i have a good lead on a government contract but i'm not going to know if i get it for two years they're going to tell you that doesn't sound great to me because i need to know

[00:25:26] that you're going to be profitable uh in about another year or two year and a half if i'm going to give you your next round of funding so the two systems were simply incompatible and for

[00:25:37] that reason in 2016 when we arrived in Silicon Valley uh venture investors simply told the people they funded hey don't even take a meeting with the government it won't help uh you get your

[00:25:50] next round of funding um in fact if you if you if you try to break into the government market as a young startup we actually will withdraw our funding we'll take it away because we don't

[00:26:01] think you can win wait until you go public and you're much bigger and you can hire um lobbyists and specialists and uh grow a government business don't do it now as a startup and so what would

[00:26:13] you do what what worked for you well you know there were people that were uh back in in washington in the acquisition community the people that um run this massive system of of how the panic

[00:26:26] gone by is it's uh it's technology beginning to imagine how can we make it easier how can we break into this other technology ecosystem how can we reimagine a different world where we're

[00:26:38] not the prime mover and we have you know five or six defense primes who are custom uh whose whole mission is to is to meet our every need right and to cater to us um how can we enter

[00:26:51] a market where uh people are skeptical of us um how can we make a contract on commercial terms that doesn't require you to have an auditing system that's not commercial specific that's

[00:27:03] you know bespoke for the department of defense how can we we wave all of the red tape that we ordinarily would impose on a public contract uh and and know that it's safe to do that because

[00:27:13] we're accessing technology where prices are generally set in a free market where you don't have to have that system of cost accounting uh to ensure taxpayer dollars are are being invested

[00:27:24] wisely so um you know and this is an incredible story it goes to show how one individual can can really make a difference but on our staff was a 29 year old woman named Lauren Daley

[00:27:38] we met the first week in the office as we were getting to know the people that were at the unit and she said hey you know there's a bunch of people in the acquisition community that have

[00:27:47] this kind of wild idea for how we could do things differently um and it all relates to a single clause that was inserted into this year's national defense authorization act

[00:27:59] the um act of congress that funds the department uh and I think uh this could allow us to actually work with startups on terms they would um they would be willing to do business with us on and so

[00:28:12] my uh my co-author Raj asked Lauren you know well it's great like can you maybe like write up a paper like that describes how we could actually do this and and so she hands Raj a 20 page paper so I've

[00:28:24] actually already written one so we read it and we realized that Lauren was really onto something there was this powerful new authority that a renegade senate staffer had like literally

[00:28:35] snuck in the dark of night into this uh enormous law and so a couple days later Lauren and I flew to Washington and we met in quick succession with the head of acquisition policy in the Pentagon the

[00:28:50] head acquisition lawyer in the Pentagon and ultimately with the general council of the department of defense to um make sure everybody saw what we saw in the new law and uh and grew a consensus quickly that we should try out a much faster means of contracting

[00:29:09] and so within two weeks we codified a new policy that allowed us to let a contract between 30 to 60 days and to do so on on commercial terms which was remarkable it didn't it

[00:29:21] had never really been done before in that way and and so what what did you do with it well uh we then uh went around to firms we knew had technology that could be useful military missions

[00:29:39] and and and useful right away I mean not something that you'd have to like engineer to make work on the battlefield but something that would be kind of turnkey and we rapidly set out to begin technology pilots and we did I think 10 or 12 of them in our first

[00:29:58] 100 days and I'll be darned but like a few of them worked really well like what well you know of all things we discovered a flying car company in Silicon Valley called Jobe Aviation Jobe Aviation was at that time a stealth startup so they were not advertising

[00:30:21] themselves but of course we knew people who knew them and we got introduced and they were developing an electronic powered V-Tall aircraft so literally a flying air taxi that can take

[00:30:34] off and land vertically but fly horizontally at a very high rate of speed and we knew that this uh technology could be really interesting to the military right I mean you don't need a runway to land

[00:30:48] it unlike a helicopter it's actually quite quiet also it's smaller so rather than loading a lot of people on a helicopter which can be very vulnerable and we've had some very tragic incidents of losing large numbers of people you know in helicopter shoot downs you could

[00:31:08] disaggregate forces and you know Jobe they were very well capitalized so they actually weren't interested in at first in working with the military because they asked the smart question like what's in it for us like we have plenty of money to keep developing our

[00:31:24] technology but it turned out we did something they did need which is that we had military test ranges and it's much easier to get on a military test range than it is to get on a civilian

[00:31:35] test range much less paperwork much quicker I would think you had something else that they needed which is actually legal viability for in use cases like it's unclear like there's hundreds and hundreds of

[00:31:48] flying car companies out there and if you google if you go to the google's patent site there's gazillion patents on flying car technology no no city is ever gonna at this point years

[00:32:00] and years later no city is even close to approving flying cars maybe san francisco but that would be about it and but the military can actually use these things yeah so that's true too so you know

[00:32:12] we did we were able to get some hay there's a there's an orthogonal mission set and by experimenting your technology on the mission set you're going to get a lot of data you're

[00:32:23] going to get user feedback and you're going to be able to fly quickly on our test range and so so began a multi-month period of experimentation di you actually acquired the first joby aircraft fast forward eight years later the joby ev tall

[00:32:42] aircraft is presently undergoing operational testing with the air force it's about to become part of the year the u.s. Air Force fleet which is an overall ado well it will perform a number of potential missions you know one is transporting people another is transporting

[00:33:01] supplies and because the vehicle is can be both piloted but also has a autonomous capabilities you can just imagine how this would be useful to move and resupply troops or forward positions

[00:33:18] that are in areas of danger and risk where you wouldn't want to ask a helicopter crew to go in if you didn't have to so there's a world of possibility that the air force will have open to

[00:33:31] it as they begin to acquire joby aircraft at scale it seems like also you've done a lot of stuff with drones and like you mentioned with ukraine these kamikaze drones in mass are are taking out the last generation of military innovation with the hundred year old technology

[00:34:04] of tanks so so it seemed and drones is something that's been fairly big in silicon valley over the past 10 years what are some of the successes with drones so very early at at di you we were aware of

[00:34:20] you know things that were happening on the battlefield in places like syria afghanistan and iraq and there were two things happening one isis and taliban fighters were actually acquiring commercial drones you know commercially off literally off amazon primarily through the company

[00:34:41] dji the chinese drone maker that makes the most popular drones and they were using them against us forces and they were using them to do things like disrupt special forces raids because the

[00:34:55] drone would be able to spot our assault teams coming they also at times early in our existence used them to drop grenades and actually kill us troops so that called the attention of battlefield commanders hey are fairly unsophisticated adversaries that don't have you know their own predator

[00:35:18] drones or their own helicopters or their own fighter aircrafts are nevertheless finding ways to defeat our various sophisticated technology using cheap consumer drones and then the other thing that was happening was our forces had access to various sophisticated high-end drones surveillance

[00:35:34] drones and they had access to some tactical drones but nothing as simple and easy to operate as a dji drone so some units were literally taking dji drones with them into combat some us units

[00:35:50] and using them for reconnaissance using them for surveillance and that was a problem because dji drones being chinese made we couldn't be sure that they weren't recording where they were in the world and what they were looking at and then uploaded that information ultimately to to chinese servers

[00:36:12] so in response to these developments defense innovation unit and this is something we disclosed for the first time in the book started a special task force called rogue squadron and rogue squadron was the military's first commercial drone unit and it was started by

[00:36:30] two real renegades mark jay jakebson an air force at that time lieutenant colonel and ryan beal a navy helicopter pilot who was also a coder and both of them were drone hobbyists they love

[00:36:44] drones like between the two of them i think they owned over 50 different commercial drones that they would just had been like playing with kind of mad max style and so they set up literally in the parking

[00:36:56] lot of defense innovation unit a test range where they could fly the drones they had drones prototype drones from startups in silo con valley companies that were testing out counter drone technology and began they began to experiment you know what what could we do about adversaries

[00:37:20] that are using dji drones are there ways to disrupt them are there ways to if we capture one of them exploited and figure out where the operator launched it from can we take dji drones that

[00:37:33] are being used by american forces because they're the only consumer drone on the market you know that has so much capability they have you know 90 percent of the market share and can we make

[00:37:44] them safe so that we can be sure that the locations where they're being used won't be disclosed won't slip out to somebody else's computer servers and in in short order they did all of these things

[00:38:00] and that led to some really important programs that are still ongoing in the military today one program to make commercial drones safe to literally declare okay you know these drones are

[00:38:14] safe to be used by the u.s. military by other government entities because we can we can be sure there there's not a counterintelligence risk and then other efforts to create both offensive and defensive drone technology that today is being used in ukraine yeah and then and then

[00:38:32] Palmer Palmer lucky the guy who who started Oculus which sold for two billion to Facebook at a virtual reality headset maker he started a drone company yeah i mean so Palmer lucky you know clearly one of the most incredible technologists of our generation came to visit my co-author

[00:38:54] Raj at defense innovation unit along with another venture capitalist Trace Stevens somebody that had a lot of national security experience had himself worked in the intelligence community and then worked for Palantir before going to Founders Fund one of the more prominent venture capitalist

[00:39:10] here in silicon venture capital firms here in Silicon Valley and they were trying to imagine hey if we could create a new company focused on this whole new generation of advanced defense technology how should we do it what are the most important problems that software and hardware

[00:39:30] designed by leading product engineers could solve so they came by to have a chat with Raj to kind of brainstorm together and that brainstorm before they even you know sort of decided to formally

[00:39:44] build a company and ultimately name it and a role gave birth to today what is one of the most important new companies in the world in terms of the technology it's producing

[00:39:56] and you know fast forward just a few short years and a role in something that really was a surprise an astonishing development won a major contract from the US Air Force probably the most important

[00:40:11] contract the US Air Force has led in the last 20 years to develop something called combat collaborative aircraft so these are supersonic stealth drones that will fly alongside F-35s and other manned aircraft and give the Air Force whole new capabilities you know

[00:40:32] swarming a fleet of swarming supersonic stealthy drones that can both perform reconnaissance missions but also can perform strike missions and the two final performers as that contract competition went forward were both non-traditional one was general atomics not you know necessarily

[00:40:51] known for building aircraft and then the other was was and a role and this is a you know a huge success this shows that what defense innovation unit set out to do is actually happening in

[00:41:06] that we now have venture capitalists that are viewing the military as a viable customer as a customer that's not going to just make its startups go bankrupt if they try and compete for

[00:41:19] contracts and that in turn has led a whole new generation of founders to say you know I actually want to focus on building the next generation of military technology until you have an only

[00:41:32] ender all but other companies like shield AI like Joby like sail drone that are becoming unicorns whose valuations are now north of a billion dollars joining the first you know a league of defense sort of SpaceX and Palantir in this whole new generation of companies that are now

[00:41:54] selling really advanced technology developed in modern ways by leading Silicon Valley engineers to the military well you know and you mentioned you mentioned Palantir wasn't Palantir initially funded by Incutel which was kind of the CIA equivalent of what you were doing with

[00:42:10] DIU so there was kind of this something already happening but this it was more on the CIA side in terms of of you know funding startups yeah Incutel is a really a busy and an interesting institution it is actually a venture fund unlike defense innovation unit which

[00:42:33] simply invests in R&D pilots so it doesn't actually you know buy a stake in a company it just buys their product to try out Incutel was created in the wake of 9-11 by some visionary people who

[00:42:48] realized you know as our boss secretary of Ash Carter did that the US government's monopoly on advanced technology was starting to dissipate that the rise of companies like Apple, Amazon, Microsoft each of whom had you know Google each of whom had a market capitalization larger than

[00:43:08] the entire defense industry combined meant that the locus of innovation was shifting out to the commercial sector and so unless the intelligence community was also able to access that technology ecosystem the sort of James Bond Q shop of special toys

[00:43:27] you know would eventually be out of pace by what you could buy in the consumer market and so Incutel has been out on the valley for a long time and invest fairly small amounts of money

[00:43:38] as a way of observing what technology could be used by the intelligence community and then making introductions between those companies and potential customers within the IC and so that model was important for us to replicate in many ways and build on

[00:44:00] but for the Department of Defense which is a very different creature than the intelligence community and has a different mission set and as well as a different scale to it. And where did you guys intersect with AI like how did you start bringing AI I know AI

[00:44:15] was a big focus for you so how did you start bringing AI into up to speed for the military? Well when we arrived in Silicon Valley in 2016 that was a year where in particular machine learning

[00:44:29] was really coming of age and so you know machine learning was beginning to be you know as accurate as a human in spotting certain things. So that's really incredible right there's you know a machine almost as good or even in small use cases better than human eyeballs at

[00:44:51] processing data or information. So right away we realized well you know here we are still sort of fighting the wars in the aftermath of 9-11 in Iraq and Afghanistan and facing insurgents that

[00:45:08] are implanting you know IEDs which can still you know be destructive even to our most advanced armor. So we're you know we built this massive surveillance system to surveil the battlefield and to try and track insurgents spot them planting IEDs and so there's one device in particular called

[00:45:31] Gorgon Stair which is a drone or you can actually put it on a balloon as well an aerostat and it will essentially use hundreds of cameras to look at an area the size of Disney World

[00:45:48] and take you know multiple snapshots a second of what's going on with video and photography. So this is a massive amount of data to process you know way more data than any team of human analysts

[00:46:03] could day in day out keep track of. So we along with some others in the Pentagon began an initiative called Project Maven which was an experiment to see could machines and machine learning algorithms begin to process this data in ways that could flag

[00:46:25] places where human analysts might want to go back and look. So can we tell the difference between a tank and an ambulance? Can we identify markers that you would want to go back and have a

[00:46:40] an actual human intelligence look at from this you know these gigabytes and terabytes of imagery that's coming off multiple platforms and that led to a real breakthrough which showed that yes you actually can use machine learning much more efficiently than the limited number of

[00:47:00] intelligence analysts you have and it ultimately led to the creation of something called the Joint AI Center in the Pentagon which was an attempt to centralize a group of experts, technologists and military strategists to seed AI across the military and to take it into many

[00:47:22] more different mission sets. And what other successes have come out of that? Like what are their technologies are we using now? Well on artificial intelligence I mean everything from using it to predict aircraft maintenance so you know every modern aircraft has got a lot of

[00:47:42] parts in it they all break at different rates you can replace them on a set schedule but you're still going to get surprised based on the conditions you're deploying the aircraft in. So

[00:47:53] if you can just figure out a few parts that are likely to break you know the next flight cycle and go ahead and replace them now rather than have an aircraft have to return to base

[00:48:02] and not be able to complete a mission that's a huge gain in operational performance. And so one of AI's other early successes in the department was helping increase the number of flyable hours that aircraft and unmanned platforms were able to achieve.

[00:48:23] AI is now more recently being used in even more advanced mission sets so one of the most successful defense innovation unit programs today that happened long after Raj and I left the unit happened with the Navy's underwater mine detection mission. So you know mines you know which

[00:48:44] are military technology that actually date to ancient China I think like literally to the main dynasty or hundreds of years no maybe not that far back but hundreds of years ago you know mines were also used in the American Revolutionary War and the Civil War

[00:49:02] and they're still around today and it turns out particularly in some of the most likely potential conflict scenarios including Taiwan mining could be very decisive. So the Navy works hard at being

[00:49:17] good at having autonomous vehicles that can as well as ships it can go and detect where mines have been planted and then diffuse them before they collide with a Navy ship or a submarine and artificial intelligence underwater proves to be really important to increasing the

[00:49:39] efficiency of an underwater water vehicle to be able to notice hey what's that anomaly over there you know maybe I should go take a look at it now and have an algorithm that will redirect you know this underwater vehicle in that direction rather than have to wait for

[00:49:57] data collectors to you know pull the tape from the from the vehicle process it and say oh shoot I wish we would have you know now we have to mount another underwater vehicle to go take a second look. So little upgrades like that have you know

[00:50:11] in cases doubled or quadrupled the mission effectiveness of some of these underwater vehicles which which you know is a very important development for the US Navy. Are there any technologies that have kind of ethical issues in commercial use that you wouldn't

[00:50:29] have in like military use so for instance facial recognition. So obviously facial recognition in the consumer space it was kind of floated out there and then quickly slapped down you know

[00:50:43] oh we we think we might see you in a photo I would get these messages on Facebook but then that technology sort of went away from from commercial use for for good reason but

[00:50:53] obviously with military use it could be important like oh we have this satellite footage of this marketplace in Afghanistan turns out there's one of the big military leaders is there because we recognize them from the satellite using artificial recognition technology. So anything

[00:51:10] any initiatives like that or do you get slowed down by the commercial ethical issues. Well I mean it's always important with technology whether it's in a consumer context or a governmental context or a law enforcement context or a military context to be very attuned

[00:51:29] to to ethical issues and you know as we experienced with Project Maven where there was a large protest by some Google employees who were caught off guard by the fact that their company was was engaged in this technology pilot and also had a misunderstanding based on a fairly

[00:51:51] sensational headline you know this is a story about how one headline can really impact a lot of a large number of people into into thinking about something the wrong way the headline implied that Google was working on an offensive drone warfare project rather than a

[00:52:08] defensive surveillance analysis project but in any event you know technologies that are producing this technology have of course a special responsibility to being attuned to its use cases and to speak up when they see potential harms because they may well see those harms

[00:52:27] before others you know as do of course you and I as as citizens so yes certainly there are there are examples like face recognition technology that you know you or I would not want to be deployed

[00:52:38] you know by our local mall security right or potentially by police forces in our city but that you would imagine you know we would we would both feel comfortable deploying on the battlefield but there's actually you know it cuts another way as well which is that

[00:52:57] you know if if if you know you and I are using a commercial laptop and it crashes and has to restart you know it's no big deal right I mean maybe this podcast gets interrupted you know maybe you

[00:53:12] get caught up a zoom meeting for a few minutes but if that's the computer running an airplane that you're flying in it crashing and restarting could be a real problem so you know there is a

[00:53:25] phrase that's fair that says beta testing can kill people and that speaks to part of the skepticism that is fair from people in the military that say you know for so long consumer

[00:53:39] technology sure I mean it was fun like my kids have iPhones but do we actually know it's going to perform on the battlefield in different conditions in high temperatures under extremes

[00:53:52] under high g-loads so there has to be a way also to make sure that commercial technology that may work well in everyday life will also work well on the battlefield yeah so with with facial

[00:54:05] recognition is this something that is starting to be considered for military use or you know these types of technologies uh well there's yeah there is a you know quite a history to this and

[00:54:19] this goes back to um actually the iraq war where um you know during an incredible insurgency the u.s. military was doing its best to try and secure the iraqi population to make them safe by

[00:54:35] uh figuring out the you know who the small number of insurgents were um and and and trying to to take them off the battlefield and um you know it's it's really interesting I got a chance to

[00:54:49] serve as a civilian in iraq and in parts of 2006 and 2007 so the most violent years of the war and you know just one or two people out of a hundred it turns out can really cause a breakdown

[00:55:05] you know in sovereignty um can take a you know a villager a town from a place of relative peace to one of extreme violence where everyone's stuck inside their homes and and so even then there

[00:55:19] was a question of of um uh you know biometric identification um how do we know when we capture somebody in a um in a house we just rated who they actually are and you know have we capture them

[00:55:35] before and release them because we thought they weren't actually part of an insurgent cell but then we find them again with explosive residue on their hand um so yeah indeed um these are the kinds of technologies that matter because on the battlefield they help you separate combatant from

[00:55:53] civilian and so you would want uh you know a military particularly one that abides by the laws of war and does its best to minimize uh harms to civilians to be equipped with technology

[00:56:06] that's very good at identifying people and is the technology getting there is the is the technology good now uh well this is not this is a little bit outside my uh domain but uh this

[00:56:17] is indeed been a huge focus of of the intelligence community and and the US military and um I have to imagine that uh the technology today is a lot better than it was a generation ago

[00:56:30] I mean given what you know and and your experiences with the with the di you and and again bridging this gap between Silicon Valley and the military and all the things you discussed

[00:56:39] in your book if you were to start a company today to bridge this gap what would you what would you focus on while we're in this interesting moment right where you know again the civilian technology

[00:56:52] economy the consumer market has grown so much larger than um the military one so so I would start a company that would take areas where the consumer technology market is clearly in the

[00:57:07] lead and apply that to technologies that would help us make us more safe and secure so um you know artificial intelligence is a sort of become a canonical example right I mean this is

[00:57:19] arguably the first major technology that yeah sure there was some government r&d much earlier but the generative uh AI wave that we're now living through which is extraordinary and it's like a

[00:57:32] Thomas and as is an light bulb moment that was produced entirely by the private sector by uh you know you know three companies four companies three of whom are within 10 miles of where I am right

[00:57:46] now and and so I would um want to position myself to take those leading edge technologies and then imagine the ways they can be used differently um uh than our you know the

[00:58:00] existing technologies we use to keep ourselves safe and secure uh like like what's specific like okay if I were to throw something out I would want to create something that could scan all email sent

[00:58:14] to anybody to see what might be to flag what might be suspicious you know terrorists talking to each other about plans to attack something and again ethical qualms aside like that would

[00:58:28] seem to be a useful thing in the military and and possible like in the sense that you could probably there's probably plenty of examples of suspicious emails over the decades that you could analyze

[00:58:40] and learn from to create an AI language model that can at least help flag potential dangerous emails uh that's I mean certainly an intelligence community mission um uh I mean the things that

[00:58:54] I think about as as somebody you know as a national security strategist um uh you know that are certainly top of mind um are you know how do we uh make sure we don't get into a great power

[00:59:08] war um you know a war between truly advanced militaries right I mean we haven't had a a great power war for three generations now since the second world war and what happened there was

[00:59:19] horrific it was on a scale unlike any of the other conflicts that we're seeing today so um and you know what one certain uh worry that I think a lot you know more people are talking about now is

[00:59:32] is um is the United States and China you know as our relationship which which is one still today of incredible economic interdependence is running into more tensions tensions about Taiwan tensions about China's behavior to its neighbors um tensions about China's economic

[00:59:51] coercion of other nations so as we try and think about um uh rising global tensions between two superpowers that are both very advanced how can we how can we keep the peace and of course one

[01:00:04] of the ways of keeping the peace is to field military systems that alter the calculus of your adversary that make them think it's just not worth it to try and go to war um that even

[01:00:17] though for our own reasons we might want to um you know uh make make Taiwan you know our our long lost province come back to the homeland um uh you know maybe maybe we need to shift the

[01:00:35] calculus so that the costs of doing that are simply too high so those are some of the military problems that I think about when I um try and imagine how how new technology

[01:00:45] could actually make a real difference how would how would you make the the cost of invading Taiwan too high other than with nuclear you know the threat of nuclear weapons well um

[01:00:58] you know uh uh so Taiwan's an island right I mean you have to get there right you have to cross a sea um uh and so I think that's uh you know where where a fight over Taiwan would would

[01:01:13] would take place and so you have to imagine um under incredibly pressurized circumstances far more so than today on the battle lines of Ukraine um you know with massive um electronic warfare capabilities on both sides how in a very contested environment would you be able to

[01:01:35] stop um an invasion so uh a technology that's autonomous that can fight through jamming that can operate in areas where it's not going to be able to connect with global positioning systems

[01:01:47] which where it's going to have to figure out where it is on its own uh those are the kinds of systems I think that will be most important to um deterring um conflict and in uh in Taiwan

[01:02:01] so you know it seems like it's going to be very hard ultimately as technology improves like let's say let's say drones could be the size of mosquitoes and let's say they all they're all equipped with

[01:02:14] GPS and facial recognition software and explosives so you you can imagine China sending in a a million of these mosquito drones into Taiwan oh I recognize this person he's the leader of

[01:02:29] Taiwan here's the generals of Taiwan and you know in in one hour you know go at supersonic speeds from from from China over to Taiwan high enough that it can't be affected by any you know ships

[01:02:41] that might be protecting Taiwan and just take everyone out that they need to very quickly and there's almost nothing we could do about something like that as the technology improves well um you know this this brings to mind um you know older literature and political science that is

[01:02:59] that is newly relevant on something called strategic stability and um you know one of the counterintuitive outcomes of the proliferation of nuclear weapons so um nuclear weapons developed you know as we've all seen in the movie Oppenheimer here by the United States in Los Alamos but

[01:03:19] quickly stolen by the Soviets from their nuclear technology proliferates in the next couple decades to a small number of other nations around the world so you know the question the question is you know did nuclear weapons make the world a more dangerous place I mean these

[01:03:37] are horrifically destructive weapons or did they actually make the world a safer place because they reduced the likelihood that nations that had nuclear weapons would actually go to war with one another because you know a nuclear exchange is no good for anybody and indeed in certain ways

[01:03:56] the advent of of nuclear proliferation has reduced great power conflict demonstrably now you know there are limits to this would you want everybody in the world to have their own personal nuclear weapon you certainly wouldn't and so one of the open questions that we should

[01:04:13] all be alert to as citizens is is some of this new autonomous technology driven by AI going to increase strategic stability is it gonna make great power war make war less likely because

[01:04:30] of the high cost involved were war to break out or is it gonna in different ways destabilize the international system where one nation gains a sudden advantage that that changes the calculus it has about whether it will go to war against another in a particular circumstances so these

[01:04:48] are all things that are now being very very actively studied and debated not only by national security strategist but by a lot of other americans who are you know I've seen all the Hollywood movies right about the Terminator and should be very focused on how technology is

[01:05:08] changing our world yeah I guess even in like cyber security like you look what happened a few weeks ago with CrowdStrike now we think that wasn't some sort of hack by a foreign you know actor but

[01:05:21] it could have been and we see how quickly it you know took down almost the whole infrastructure of you know many industries across the world and we could see as as cyber security gets even more

[01:05:34] sophisticated particularly combined with AI that could easily happen again and again and again and I worry we were heading into some kind of black hole where we we the technology gets so good

[01:05:47] of offense and there is no defense and we're just in non-stop trouble well you know this brings to the fore another concept that comes out of the Cold War and strategic stability and military history and strategy more generally which is the offense of defense balance and

[01:06:06] how will technology change it and you know again anytime you experience a major shift something that gives the offense dominance you know then you may end up in a situation where

[01:06:20] countries if they have a reason to go to war will judge that well you know maybe we actually have a shot at achieving our objectives at a cost that is acceptable to us and so you know you can imagine

[01:06:35] a nightmare scenario right where AI gets very good at hacking or creating cyber disruptions but it's equally true that AI you know as DARPA has demonstrated in some very advanced experiments including their cyber challenge that AI can also be used to autonomously patch

[01:06:56] systems and much more quickly detect vulnerabilities and code than human cybersecurity professionals so you know again it's an open question will really powerful AI models in the end be a threat to cybersecurity or will they enhance it what do you think well I think the jury is out

[01:07:22] but if I were an advanced country that requires a lot of you know microprocessors to make my daily life work I mean my to my toaster downstairs has got a microprocessor in it right I would want to

[01:07:37] make a lot of investments right now in AI tools that will enhance cyber defense because it's my interest to make sure my very vulnerable and tightly coupled infrastructure will stay safe so all these things should hopefully be guiding the investments we make as a nation as a society

[01:08:00] and and we better get them right because if we get them wrong we're going to be exposing ourselves on our way of life to to risk well from your mouth to God's ears or at least the

[01:08:12] government's ears as they start purchasing more and more of these technologies and and you did a great thing by starting this this DIU to bridge this gap between the technology of Silicon Valley

[01:08:27] and the needs of the of the military and you and and Raj Shah your partner in this wrote write about it in the book unit X how the Pentagon and Silicon Valley are transforming the future of war

[01:08:38] so really great stuff we only touched the surface of it there's so many technologies that we're being left in the in the dust on and now we've been catching up and and you describe a lot

[01:08:50] of this and and it's also a good textbook on how to deal with bureaucracy it was really fascinating how you you worked around some of the issues and some of the problems that you

[01:08:59] almost found yourself in so very riveting story unit X thank you so much thanks for coming on the podcast thanks for having me on