0:04
Hello everyone and welcome back to conversations with Tyler.
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Today I'm here with Christopher Kirchhoff.
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He wrote a book that I thought was great.
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It is Unit X, how the Pentagon and Silicon Valley are transforming the future of war and that is co-authored with Raj M. Shah.
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This book has a rave review from the Financial Times and on Twitter also from Chris Blattman. Chris, welcome. Thank you, Tyler.
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I have many questions about your topic.
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How permanent is the ascendancy of drone warfare? So it's the thing now.
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Is this the next 100 years, the next 5 years, what?
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It's certainly the next generation of military technology and you know, we've seen this coming for a while, right?
0:42
DIU Defense Innovation Unit, the topic of the book, in 2017 started the military's first commercial drone unit and began experimenting with both offensive and defensive uses of of drones.
0:57
Uh and now we see um the full coming of the circle of the future that that that some people in the military saw then, which is that, you know, just last month in Ukraine, the military has had to uh ask the US military has had to ask the Ukrainians to remove from the front all 31 of the M1A1 Abrams battle tanks that we gave the Ukrainians because a quarter of them had been destroyed by Russian kamikaze drones.
1:21
So not only is it the ascendancy of an era of drone warfare, but it's probably the end of man mechanized warfare as well uh on land and we can also talk about similarly epic changes at sea and in the air and in space.
1:36
But some of the drones already are not working that well, like the Turkish drones seem less powerful than a few years ago.
1:42
What is one possible way that defense against drones might catch up?
1:48
Well, uh that's a I think right now a very open question.
1:49
I think drones are uh uh primarily offensive dominant in the sense that um you know, there's right now almost 300 companies in Ukraine that um uh have faster innovation cycles at this at this moment than all of the Western military companies fielding drones.
2:04
And so if you go to the front lines today in Ukraine, I got a chance to visit there in October with my co-author Rod Shaw, you will you will find predominantly Ukrainian drones operating.
2:15
And the reason why is that they're literally able to go back to garage shops all over the country and overnight change the algorithm the the drone to respond to rapidly evolving Russian electronic warfare tactics that change the counter jamming in part. Yeah.
2:33
Can you imagine the Pentagon having a process like that?
2:36
I don't mean it this moment, but if matters were somehow more dire for us? Yeah.
2:40
Is there a way we could do something like that?
2:42
Or just it would never happen?
2:44
Well, you know, the Pentagon is trying and last a few months ago they they announced something called the replicator initiative led by a defense innovation unit, which is a push to develop autonomous swarming drones for in the air and and on sea and under sea also.
3:01
Um but you know, an important caveat to that, you know, this is an initiative that was announced more than a year after the start of the Ukraine war, which tells you we're playing catch up.
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And because it was announced outside the budget cycle, they've had to go around and bureaucratically pull money from other programs, which is a whole extra step.
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And if you add up all the money that the Pentagon is spending on replicator, it's less than you know, a percent of the procurement spend of the Pentagon.
3:29
So I think the question is, you know, that program is directionally right, but it certainly is not right in size or scale in comparison to the changes we're seeing not just in in in Ukraine, but in the Middle East and other places around the world with autonomous weapon systems.
3:44
But say our forces had greater immediate combat responsibilities than is currently the case.
3:49
Though there are some now as of course, you know.
3:52
Is it laws that would stop us from speeding up, tinkering with drones, or is it cultural inertia in institutions?
4:00
What's the relative balance there?
4:00
Oh, it's completely cultural inertia.
4:03
So, there's no laws in the way.
4:03
We're just not good at it.
4:04
Uh no, well, you know, there are parts of the military that are good at, like DARPA, like Defense Innovation Unit, that have a phenomenal track record.
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But, not like in a 3-to-4-day time window.
4:14
Um well, uh some of DARPA's cyber programs and some of DIU's where DIU's work, you know, does in a in a month, you know, I actually produce things.
4:23
Um and you know, it you can imagine in the context of a longer conflict and ecosystem on the US side quickly developing.
4:29
But, the reality is that if you look at the you know, the Pentagon spend even now 2 years into the Ukraine conflict, it's it's you know, largely, to be honest, along historical trend lines.
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So, that tells me the military really isn't changing even as many of the military's senior leaders recognize how quickly war is changing.
4:50
Now, Ukraine is using drones for defense, of course.
4:52
But, on average, does current drone technology favor offense or defense?
4:58
Uh you know, uh what's really really remarkable about the Ukrainian drone ecosystem is, you know, they're not just building simple kamikaze drones.
5:06
They're building surveillance drones that will automatically go fly, surveil the battlefield, return, upload images that can then be uploaded to, you know, killer drones that then go out.
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Uh on top of this, you have uh people using open-source software to build uh fusion uh you know, fusion systems that take sensor data from EW detection systems, feed live feed from drones, and put them all together on a controller that uh an operating unit going forward actually uses to mount a coordinated attack using multiple drone systems.
5:41
So, this is to say, in effect, Ukrainian startups have replicated the entire battle management system of the US Air Force.
5:49
They have, you know, effectively AWACS drones, attack drones.
5:55
Um, it's quite remarkable what they've done with open source software and hardware that is pennies on the dollar compared to any system in the Western arsenal.
6:03
If we think about Azerbaijan versus Armenia, right?
6:05
Turkish drones helped Azerbaijan much more than anything helped Armenia.
6:09
Is there any kind of generalization looking forward?
6:11
Uh, drones are good for Israel.
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Drones are good for countries willing to tolerate a lot of disruption.
6:17
Drones are good for fill in the blank. What would you say?
6:21
I think drones are good for anybody looking to defeat a conventional military operating in conventional ways.
6:27
And I'll just list off a couple examples.
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So, one, how was it that Hamas fighters bridged uh, the border in Gaza, which is essentially a modern-day Maginot Line with multiple lines of defenses?
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The key tactical maneuver they pulled off on October 7th was using quadcopters to drop small charges on the generators powering the border tower surveillance systems.
6:48
So, uh, similarly, you know, the Houthis have effectively uh, you know, harassed shipping now with a combination of loitering munitions, cruise missiles, and autonomous drones.
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And then in northern Israel, perhaps most strikingly, Hezbollah has depopulated the first 10 miles of northern Israel using loitering munitions and cruise missiles because the IDF can't effectively defend uh, their northern border.
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And that has that has displaced 85,000 Israeli civilians.
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And this is, you know, the IDF is a very modern military.
7:22
Is there a forthcoming era of assassination by drone? Do we know this? Can we prepare for it?
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What will that look like?
7:28
Presidents never step outside?
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Uh, you know, to be honest, it's not outside the realm of possibility.
7:34
I mean, you can ask the question today, uh, what US military installation uh, or uh, important government site is adequately defended against uh an extremely advanced, unprompted, uh surprise drone attack.
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Uh you know, I I would guess the the number is very few, if not perhaps zero.
7:55
Uh and there are people now very actively, you know, not only at Homeland Security, but in the in the Department of Defense, looking at how you defend against this. But it's very hard. Drones are small.
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We don't have early warning radars, you know, in the same way that we missed the Chinese spy balloon, that are tuned to detect drones.
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So, now people are asking questions, you know, can you use cell phone tower transmissions, and uh use AI algorithms to process from that, and and detect uh flying small drones that we don't expect to be uh to be there.
8:29
US is somewhat behind in 5G compared to some other nations.
8:32
For military issues, does this matter?
8:36
Well, it's a you know, it's a fascinating uh uh illustration of how we as a nation, as a state, have not made wise choices with our allocation of resources.
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And the the story in a nutshell is that um in the Cold War, um through the end of the Cold War, the military made enormous investments in a set of military systems that took up a significant part of the best 5G spectrum.
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So, Navy radars, um some other highly classified systems and covert systems, and the expense of shifting those systems away from the frequency that turns out to be best for 5G uh is enormous.
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And and yet, we don't have a mechanism in the government, right, that uh uh can take these sort of long-term looks at spectrum.
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Spectrum is a an example of where we're failing strategically.
9:26
So, as a result, uh if you go to Beijing, 5G speeds are what? 50 times faster? 100 times faster?
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Because they're on a completely different part of the 5G spectrum. But faster for what? Why should I care?
9:36
Go to South Korea, everything's faster, but in terms of absolute time, I don't feel I save anything.
9:43
Well, I mean, if you think about what's coming next and what 5G will enable, uh you have self-driving cars, right?
9:49
Um self-driving cars are not going to be able to get better, um along with a whole bunch of sort of connected devices without really fast, uh 5G that penetrates really far.
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I mean, you can buy a Tesla, you know, it's great if it drives around in the city, but what if you're trying to go visit a national park out west in a place where there is is very little cell connectivity.
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So, 5G really is a a national innovation emergency uh that we have yet to find a solution to.
10:21
Now, I never understand what I read about hypersonic missiles.
10:22
So, I see in the media, China has launched the world's first nuclear-capable hypersonic, and it goes 10x the speed of sound. And people are worried.
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If mutual assured destruction is already in place, what exactly is the nature of the worry?
10:40
Is it just we don't have enough response time?
10:43
It's a number of things, and when you add them up, they really are quite uh frightening.
10:47
So, hypersonic weapons, uh because of the way they maneuver, uh don't necessarily have to follow a ballistic trajectory, which means uh we have, you know, very sophisticated space-based systems that can detect the launch of a a missile, particularly a nuclear missile.
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Um uh but, you know, right then you're immediately calculating uh where it's going to go based on its ballistic trajectory.
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Well, a hypersonic weapon can steer.
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It can turn left, it can turn right, it can dive up, it can dive down.
11:17
But that's distinct from hypersonic, right?
11:19
Uh well, ICBMs don't have the same maneuverability.
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So, uh so that's one factor that makes hypersonic weapon weapons different. A second is just speed.
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So, with an ICBM launch, you have, you know, uh 20 to 25 minutes or so.
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This is why the rule for a presidential nuclear decision conference is you have to be able to get the president online with his national security advisors, and I think like 5 or 7 minutes.
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So, the whole system is time to defeat adversary threats.
11:49
The whole continuity of government system is upended by the timeline of hypersonic weapons.
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And oh, by the way, there's no way to defend against them.
11:57
So, forget the fact that they're nuclear capable.
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If you want to take out an aircraft carrier or a service combatant or assassinate a world leader, a hypersonic weapon is a fantastic way to do it.
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And watch them very carefully because more than anything else they will shift the balance of military power in the next 5 years.
12:17
And do you think they shift the power to China in particular or to larger nations or nations willing to take big chances at the conceptual level?
12:25
What's the nature of the shift above and beyond whoever has them?
12:30
Well, right now they're incredibly hard to produce.
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And so, you know, right now they're essentially in a research and development phase.
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The first nation that figures out how to make titanium just a little bit more heat resistant to make the guidance systems just a little bit better is going to you know, enables manufacturing at scale.
12:50
So, not just five or seven weapons that are test fired every year, but 25 or 50 or 75 or 100.
12:55
That really would change the balance of power in a remarkable number of military scenarios.
13:03
So, how much China has them now?
13:03
Are Are you at liberty to address that?
13:07
They just have one or two that are not really that useful or they're on the verge of having 300 or Um so, what's in the media and what's been discussed quite a bit publicly is that China has more successful R&D test of hypersonic weapons.
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Hypersonic weapons are very difficult to make fly for long periods.
13:25
They tend to self-destruct at some point during flight.
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And China has demonstrated a much fuller flight cycle of what looks to be an almost operational weapon.
13:36
And where is Russia in this space? Russia is also trying.
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Russia is developing panoply of sort of Dr. Evil weapons.
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The most The latest one to to emerge in public is this idea of putting a nuclear payload on a satellite that would effectively stop modern life as we know it by ending GPS and satellite communications.
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You know, so you know, that's that's really somebody sitting in a Dr.
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Evil layer stroking their cat coming up with ideas that are are game-changing.
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But they come up They've come up with another a number of other weapons that are quite striking.
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So, supercavitating torpedoes that could take out an entire aircraft carrier group.
14:19
Advanced states are now come up with with incredibly potent weapons.
14:25
How bad would an EMP attack be?
14:25
Let's just say set off once, but over an inhabited area.
14:29
Pick a smallish country, maybe an island it happens. What's next? Cooking stoves. How many people die?
14:39
Let's say there's a million people on the island.
14:42
How many do we Advanced economy.
14:44
Yeah, well, that's the thing.
14:45
I mean, with with neutron weapons you're you're just frying electronics.
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So, the electricity grid will probably go down in whole or in part.
14:52
If you're in the center of a strong EMP blast, a lot of microelectronics will stop working.
14:59
This means that your computer is a brick, your your car is a brick, gas station pumps are a brick.
15:06
So, EMPs are you know, another weapon from the Cold War, right?
15:12
That were tested in very sophisticated ways in the 1950s and thankfully have not been used by a major power.
15:21
And do you think of it as a greater threat against armed forces in the field or something you would use against a place with civilians?
15:28
Uh well, uh I mean, we can only hope, uh you know, in the laws of war that most violence in war ha- if we have to have an armed conflict in in the first place would be constrained to the battlefield, but as we're seeing more and more, um as homelands become more reachable through uh cyber attacks, through sabotage, uh through terrorism.
15:49
I mean, just think about the mayhem that DC sniper caused in this city uh years ago, right?
15:53
One person essentially effectively shut down a city.
15:58
So, it's hard to imagine uh a large-scale conflict playing out without large elements of domestic upheaval and sabotage.
16:07
The current potential for an AI arms race, at a philosophical level, do you think we have any choice other than just to try to win it?
16:14
Is there some other path we could think about taking?
16:17
Or just it's another arms race, we tried to win the ones before, we've got to win this one, too.
16:23
Maybe it's more important than usual.
16:26
Or is is there something else that can be done?
16:29
Well, you know, the human rights community has at a number of junctions tried to propose alternate pathways, and I'm very attuned to the arguments they're making because I think they're arguments that should be listened to.
16:39
And And by the way, when I was a Pentagon employee through the I think it's called the Combined Federal Campaign, we could donate a portion of our salary to a number of nonprofit charities.
16:50
And one of the charities I donated to was Human Rights Watch, which is a wonderfully subversive for a Pentagon employee because they actually produce incredibly great research about what's happening on the ground in conflict areas around the world that every national security official I think should be reading.
17:03
And out of Human Rights Watch and another community of computer scientists led in part by Stuart Russell, there's this movement called Stop Killer Robots that emerged about 10 years ago foreseeing the shift in AI, foreseeing the shift in the rise of smart micro drones, and asking us not to go down that path.
17:22
And I actually got to sit in a couple meetings with Stewart at the White House, and it was interesting to watch him make his argument, and you know, although I respect him incredibly as a technologist, what was interesting to me about the way he made the argument, it was without any any sense of the literature on strategic stability.
17:43
So, you know, out of the Cold War, we have this fascinating part of political science that has studied what is the consequence of the spread of nuclear weapons among states.
17:51
And to the best that you can study this question in the world, the consensus in the literature is nuclear weapons have actually lessened great power conflict in the modern world because nobody But there's a frequency versus intensity issue, right? Oh, oh, sure.
18:09
And you wouldn't want, you know, I mean, you wouldn't want everybody in the world to have access to nuclear weapon, but it shows you that sometimes technological parity can have a stabilizing effect in international relations.
18:21
And so, the question about killer robots is I think very similar.
18:25
If we were to, for instance, unilaterally disarm in a in a field of technology where you really can't have verification that the other side is also disarming.
18:36
And you can do this with nuclear weapons because of the specialized technology that goes into them.
18:42
You can do it a little bit with chemical biological weapons.
18:44
You certainly cannot do it with software. It's just too difficult.
18:48
And so, I think had that group of people been successful in in, for instance, pausing military development using AI, I think we would be even more imperiled in in Ukraine today.
19:02
And that's because of the difficulty of monitoring software compared say to nuclear weapons.
19:07
That would be one factor.
19:08
I think that autonomous weapons are here to stay.
19:13
This is how wars are likely going to be fought.
19:15
And if you decide not to pursue autonomous weapons, you're going to lose.
19:21
Right now, the US has a lead in at least many forms of generative AI.
19:26
To the extent that lead is sticky, do you think that comes from chips, from talent, from data, from something else?
19:32
We have a better private sector or what's the source of that lead?
19:36
Well, it's really remarkable, you know, I got a chance to serve um on the National Security Commission for Artificial Intelligence, which studied this issue, particularly the AI competition between China China and the US uh quite quite uh rigorously.
19:46
And you know, China as a state, of course, is making enormous investments in AI through um the doctrine of civil-military fusion that Xi announced um he has essentially directed any technology and uh company in China to ensure it's open its technologies open and available for use to for the People's Liberation Army.
20:07
So, you have a lot of things happening in China uh that are a deliberate strategy to make them the most competitive nation they can be on technology on a variety of fronts.
20:17
And yet, today, particularly with generative AI, the United States does seem to have a breakout advantage.
20:23
And uh my best guess for that is, you know, in the end, um we have um structural advantages in um a far freer market, um uh far more freedoms, and uh uh none of the suppression, right, that Xi has exerted over the tech industry, you know, at arguably his political peril the last few years in his quest to um suppress dissent uh China-wide.
20:56
My view is that they're quite afraid of AI, that they understand it will disrupt a lot of social relations.
21:03
American leaders, in a sense, are too asleep to even see that.
21:04
So, we just let things happen, and that's for the better in the long run.
21:09
Uh but they throw their CEOs in jail, and they're afraid it will take away power of the CCP, and they're just not going to catch us.
21:16
Well, but but that's certainly true for the uh population-facing AI.
21:19
So, uh you know, the stories that we've all read this past week about uh generative language models in China being held up to make sure that 60,000 censored matters wouldn't come up, right?
21:32
By you know, it was delaying their deployment.
21:34
But but that is that is a system of uh enforcement um and censorship that is focused on the civilian population.
21:41
There are also large institutions in China that are focused on solving military problems and advancing AI in the military that are not operating under those constraints.
21:51
And so, it's important to split off what we see happening with the Chinese government's attempt to control its own populace and what they're doing to try and make the PLA a fighting force that can um meet the military objectives that G has set for them.
22:03
But as you well know, there's a lot of research by accident, so to speak, that from transformers have come a lot of advances that have military relevance.
22:10
And if you try to split them off and say, "We're only going to get AI that's relevant for the military," then over time you'll just be much weaker for AI in general.
22:22
Uh well, this is a you know, similar to a conundrum that we face ourselves.
22:24
And so, you know, on the cover of Unit X, we have two images.
22:28
One is of the iPhone, the other is of the F-35 fighter, you know, the most advanced fifth-generation stealth fighter in the world.
22:35
And what what most people in in America don't realize is that these technologies are produced from completely separate technology ecosystems, and they work very differently under very different incentives.
22:46
So, the design of the F-35 was actually frozen in 2001 when the Pentagon awarded the production contract to Lockheed Martin.
22:53
It didn't become operational until 2016.
22:55
That's a long time in technology years. Um look at the iPhone.
23:02
It's processor is changed every year.
23:04
So, now we're in a situation where, uh, you know, a a $2 trillion program of record is producing jets whose processors are slower than what we're all carrying around in our pockets.
23:15
And this matters because if it turns out that, uh, 2027 AI is going to beat uh 2026 AI on the battlefield, then you had better be getting your AI from the commercial system of production, not from the bespoke military-industrial complex system of production.
23:34
Now, some people argue the major AI labs are not secure enough against, say, hostile foreign powers stealing American AI developments.
23:42
Are there changes we could make or should make that would address this but without killing the goose that's laying the golden eggs?
23:50
I think we have to be very careful.
23:50
Um, and, you know, I've seen I'll just I'll bring up one historical parallel and then, um, uh, take a take a shot at one argument that I hear circulating.
23:59
So, the historical parallel is actually with cybersecurity, where we ended up in the 2000s and 2010s with this extraordinary situation of realizing how vulnerable critical infrastructure was to cyber attacks.
24:13
And, you know, this was hard for the the national security establishment to wrap its head around because this infrastructure is owned and operated by the private sector.
24:20
And yet it's so critical to our security.
24:23
And, you know, guess what?
24:25
Initially, none of the operators of that infrastructure and none of the the CEOs and CTOs of the cybersecurity companies even had security clearances.
24:33
So, they couldn't talk to the parts of our intelligence community who knew about the kind of exploits that our adversaries were fashioning to go after our infrastructure.
24:42
Now, eventually we solved that through, uh, among other things, a really extraordinary public-private cooperation mechanism called the enduring security framework, where we got everybody clearances and we met and information was exchanged.
24:54
And, uh, there's one example that's been declassified that's extraordinary that I'd be I I'd be happy to talk about that that made safe US computers from an attack an adversary had ready.
25:06
The argument I would take a shot at though is there is this sense that the AI models that are being produced today by the frontier labs are so important that somehow the government should sort of nationalize them or maybe you know there've been some arguments made in the last couple weeks by people that have you know been employed at places like Open AI that perhaps the national labs should should step in and take a role.
25:33
And uh you know I think that's a I think that's a mistake.
25:36
You know our national labs do some things very well on the other hand they're a place where good science goes to die.
25:43
You know it's if you want to see the difference between the tech sector and the national labs drive from Lawrence Livermore to the campus of Google and see what's going on.
25:51
They are very different ecosystems.
25:53
One is ruled by the Civil Service Act the other is ruled by the free market.
25:57
And I think we have to be very careful exerting government control over breakout technology.
26:03
But that doesn't mean that that the law enforcement agencies like the FBI and our intelligence agencies can't cooperate very closely to help protect certain private firms from the nation-state threats they're most certainly facing.
26:16
Would you reform our system of security clearances?
26:18
Is it not flexible enough or too bureaucratic or is it just right? I'll tell you a story.
26:26
So I'm going up for my TS/SCI clearance for the first time you know.
26:30
And tell us what that is.
26:32
Um so this is top secret specialized compartment information.
26:34
It's it's the James Bond clearance you get before they let you see the spy satellite pictures and all that.
26:39
And you basically need it to go into any meeting on the E-Ring in the Pentagon where I'd just been appointed a young aide in the Obama administration.
26:48
And the security manager in the Secretary of Defense's office where I was managing got all flustered because uh my uh partner at the time first of all we were a a gay couple so that was you know one issue for him and then the second my partner at the time was an Indian economist.
27:04
economist. And he did not like the fact that I was cohabitating as the security clearance forum calls it with a foreign national and so he decided that I should have a polygraph test which is very unusual a counterintelligence polygraph which by
27:19
the way don't work right polygraphs are proven you know can't you can't put them in court so so my chief of staff gets upset and you know says why are you polygraphing my political appointee just because he's in a same-sex relationship with a foreign national. And so she calls she calls the head of
27:35
And so she calls she calls the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency responsible for granting our security clearances and he ruffles around a bunch of papers and looks my file up and says well his girlfriend is a dual citizen and Sandy said excuse me boyfriend right
27:52
so no I mean our security clearances will pick up very obvious irregularities if you have extreme debt issues if you if you have mental health issues I mean that the system will pick that up but it probably won't pick up much else. Over the next 10 years most countries in
28:09
Over the next 10 years most countries in our world won't be able to build their own decent AI systems.
28:13
But they might need to use AI even just to run ordinary governmental perhaps parts of their military how are they going to cope with this are they going to trust the US or trust China or what does that equilibrium look like does the US have a lot more power because we can withhold the AI or will know everything they do?
28:32
I think I think that is certainly part of the world that we're heading in but I think an even more fundamentally tricky part of that world is just the dual use nature of powerful AI so uh know, a model uh that's really powerful uh for figuring out um uh military solutions might well also be able to cure cancer.
28:57
And so, we're we're caught in these dilemmas, which are common actually with technology, of is it better uh is the net assessment of technology, you know, encryption is one of these, to just let it out there because we know on
29:09
the whole it will makes the world a better place, even though we know with encryption there are going to be moments when terrorists cells or nation-states are going to take advantage of it to successfully prosecute a small attack. So, this is the dilemma that we face
29:20
So, this is the dilemma that we face with AI on a grand scale.
29:24
And what do you think we should do?
29:27
Well, um you know, if you sit in the Pentagon and it's your profession as a national security professional to prevent 9/11s, to prevent uh wars from happening, um you are very security-minded and you are very biased towards restricting technology because that does, in the end, um help the security equation.
29:49
Uh but unless you have an argument about the what to do with a particular technology with economists and trade experts and the rest of the government, you're not going to reach uh consensus that uh is going to be best for the nation.
30:03
So, these arguments are going to have to be fought out in the situation room with a variety of expertise.
30:08
And ha- having sat in in both places, on the National Security Council and in the Pentagon, um um firmly in favor of of dual use to the absolute extent we can because I think the net assessment of that uh is is for the best.
30:26
As the Cold War ended, it seems in the defense sector we saw a lot of consolidation, much smaller number of very big suppliers.
30:34
Was it a mistake to let that happen?
30:37
You know, Bill Perry, who had his famous last supper and asked for that consolidation at the time did it because he was terribly concerned that the so-called peace dividend the lower end of the military budget it was not going to be able to sustain the larger defense industrial base that we had in place at the end of the Cold War.
30:54
So in his seat at the time that was the call he made.
30:59
It's turned out to be a disaster for the nation.
31:00
It's essentially created five large companies that are so burdened by the system of requirements and the right and the audit the audit in and accounting requirements that go along with them to produce modern weapon systems that the way to think about large defense primes is more akin to a utility company than it is a a private sector company.
31:27
And the result of that of course has been very slow innovation, a culture of cost overruns, even as some phenomenal technology is produced.
31:35
And and you have now what's and what's really important is a rise thanks to Ash Carter starting defense innovation unit and starting off a whole new cycle of venture capitalism.
31:47
You have companies like Anduril and Shield AI and other defense startups that are joining Palantir and SpaceX that are becoming a new breed of product oriented defense companies that are not burdened by the system of requirements that have you know turned our defense primes into electric utility companies to to be honest.
32:09
And I think the real strategic question now before the nation is how quickly can we say swing more of the of the weapon systems we build to this new generation of product companies that are better at it, are faster, and are far far less expensive for the taxpayer.
32:26
What do we need to do to keep DARPA dynamic?
32:30
Well, you know DARPA's always been very dynamic and well atrophy, right?
32:35
You see this almost everything in the world and often the better it is, the bigger your later problem is because it becomes self-congratulatory.
32:41
Well, one of my great frustrations as a Yalie in the Pentagon was uh you know, I got a chance uh both uh working for the Deputy Secretary of Defense and then for the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to be their liaison to DARPA.
32:51
So, I got to be read into DARPA's entire set of programs.
32:56
And um they were doing incredibly impressive work.
32:58
What was maddening is they were so far ahead of the military services, the Air Force, the Navy, uh the Army in seeing the future battlefield.
33:07
And over the years at least uh since I've dealt with them starting in 2009, they've been right way more than they've been wrong.
33:14
But very few of their visions of operational concepts and the technology to back them have moved to the center of the systems that the services have adopted.
33:23
So, there's there's a giant adoption program going on.
33:27
And this has to do with the fact that DARPA is a separate institution for the Pentagon and its focus is on creating new technology.
33:34
And uh there has been a leadership failure uh going on for years along the e-ring um that that has prevented more of the technology DARPA and other of the leading labs have produced into the mainstream of the military.
33:49
How do we overcome what is sometimes called our valley of death problem?
33:51
The some intermediate stage where an idea gets started but no one is picking up the ball and running with it.
33:57
It's not yet a product that you can sell. How do we fix that?
34:02
Well, there's a couple ways to do it.
34:02
Um uh you know, Congress took a great step earlier this year by not only codifying Defense Innovation Unit in law, um but also granting it for the first time a really significant budget of just under a billion dollars a year.
34:16
And there's a really big difference about what you can do in the defense uh innovation ecosystem with a billion dollars versus a hundred million dollars.
34:24
So, for a billion dollars, you can seed programs for long enough to not only demonstrate their success but to ensure a high likelihood that they will successfully transition to one of the services.
34:35
You can in other words, create a springboard spend more money in essence is the solution. No, no, no.
34:43
Um I I I think we need to be spending way less money on legacy systems that are demonstrably defeatable today.
34:46
So, uh you know, anybody that's been watching Ukraine in the last too much would decide that tanks are not a great investment for a modern military.
34:56
Similarly, anybody that's read even news articles about hypersonic weapons should decide that buying more aircraft carriers is not a good thing.
35:01
Uh but we do need some of that some of those resources shifted to this new defense ecosystem that's very experimental, that's building uh swarming weapons.
35:11
And you know, the Air Force is is very commendable under the leadership of Secretary uh Frank Kendall.
35:16
Uh they now have what's called the combat collaborative aircraft.
35:18
So, this is a 10,000 uh aircraft buy of supersonic stealth drones who will fly alongside man fighters in the largest change of Air Force doctrine uh since really the Wright military flyer.
35:32
And oh, by the way, guess who the two finalists are for the production contract for the this massive program.
35:38
They're Anduril on the one hand, and another non-traditional uh defense contractor, General Atomics.
35:43
The the traditional primes lost to those two companies uh for this revolutionary contract.
35:51
How is our system of Inspector Generals holding up?
35:56
You know, Tyler, thinking back now that I've been in the private sector for a number of years to my my tenure in government service, uh it's remarkable how little executive authority in government anyone has anymore.
36:09
And I'll just give you a couple examples.
36:13
Um you know, uh one, for me to go out to a think tank, to come to the Mercatus Center for a lunch and listen to a lunch talk, uh when I was on the National Security Council, I would actually have to file a waiver with the lawyers to declare that I wasn't, you know, going to a a lunch that I where I would accept an unethical gift, right?
36:31
we're feeding you or because you walk in the door?
36:33
It's because you're feeding me.
36:34
And I have to make sure that you're feeding me less than I think $22 or there's some amount that changes every year, right? yeah. Uh no sushi, exactly.
36:43
Uh but here's a couple more pernicious examples.
36:44
So, uh one of my first jobs for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Marty Dempsey, when he took over in 2012, a a year of incredible uh change, technological change.
36:54
He wanted to go visit Silicon Valley, meet with venture capitalists, go to Google, meet with startups, and see the kind of commercial technology that people were telling him would make a difference on the battlefield.
37:03
So, we organized a phenomenal trip for him to Silicon Valley that really shaped how he, as he was taking over the chairmanship, shaped his agenda as chairman.
37:14
And, you know, we get back from that trip, and I get a phone call from uh General Dempsey's uh EA, his his top officer, and he says, you know, Chris, I would can you write me a couple pages of justification for the Silicon Valley trip we just took.
37:27
And I thought, oh my gosh.
37:27
Sure enough, somebody had filed a complaint with the Inspector General that we had spent government dollars to take, you know, a boondoggle to California, and uh the IG was deciding whether or not to investigate.
37:39
So, here's a much more serious example.
37:41
serious example. Mike Brown, the second director of Defense Innovation Unit, the former CEO of Symantec, the largest cybersecurity in the world, somebody who really understands software, which is now the most important element of any military weapon systems, was in a
37:56
remarkable act of leadership and foresight nominated by President Biden to become the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment, so the lead weapons buyer in the Pentagon, somebody for responsible for driving how nearly $300 of the Pentagon's budget is spent on weapons. And uh just days before his confirmation
38:14
And uh just days before his confirmation hearing was scheduled, uh in the news bubbled up this uh complaint that had been filed at Defense Innovation Unit weeks or months earlier, and maybe even years earlier, alleging that he misused hiring authorities to try and pay engineers in Silicon Valley close to market rate so they could come to work for the government, which by the way was the mission of Defense Innovation Unit, right?
38:38
Was to bring technologists into the government.
38:40
It also alleged among other irregularities that the office snack fund, called Snacko, um had an insufficient basis of cash accounting.
38:49
Uh the person writing the complaint was a former comptroller employee.
38:53
So, um you know, receiving this complaint that the their director had uh potentially violated uh Department of Defense policy, the Department of uh or pardon me, the Defense Innovation Unit General Counsel undertook an exhaustive investigation, uh published an 82-page report, uh found no substance to any of the allegations that had been met.
39:14
So, you would think case closed.
39:16
So, at that time the Inspector General decided not to investigate the uh Pentagon's General Counsel said, "Fine, you've looked into it, you know, there are complaints all over the place, case closed."
39:24
So, on the eve of his nomination, this surfaces again.
39:30
The whistleblower goes to the media again, and surfaces in a couple articles, and he had to end up withdrawing.
39:34
He had done nothing wrong, but somebody weaponized the Inspector General system against him.
39:38
So, we're in the situation where good-minded public servants who are doing the right thing, who have done nothing wrong, are caught in this um just bizarre sort of uh process of persecution that runs at its at its own sort of civil servant speed.
39:55
And I think that's one of many factors, including frankly the Civil Service Act, that is making uh uh the talent base of the US government erode.
40:04
I mean, why is it that um governments like Singapore are so much further ahead of the United States uh in terms of the talent they're able to bring to their governments.
40:13
And not it's not just salaries, although that's a big part of it.
40:15
Um, it's part of the burden that you uh undergo by becoming a public servant.
40:22
So, more formally, if you're given the chance to restructure the status of whistleblowers, what would you change to make it better?
40:29
Well, look, whistleblowing is an important function, and there are cases of egregious behavior, and they need to be called out and stopped.
40:34
But, uh at the same time, um you know, people have you know, leaders in government, particularly those who have to work against the grain of their institutions, are going to ruffle a lot of feathers.
40:49
And, uh my co-author, Raj, and I found out that, you know, firsthand in uh uh trying to start up Defense Innovation Unit.
40:57
Uh, you know, on our first flight to Washington, our government credit cards got shut off out of spite because somebody wanted to slow us down, so we had to rebook our hotel reservations and pay out of our pocket.
41:08
That was just one of many small examples of much larger political uh attempts to stop DIU.
41:13
So, I think anybody who is working against the grain of institution to build something new um should be uh given a lot of authority uh to prosecute that mission, to to make that mission a success, and held held accountable if they don't.
41:28
And, getting wrapped up in IG investigations that end 7 years after the fact is not going to uh make our system of public administration any more effective.
41:36
Now, the title of your book again, it is Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley Are Transforming the Future of War.
41:43
Just tell us, what's Unit X?
41:45
So, Unit X uh is Defense Innovation Unit Experimental, and it was started in 2015, the year that uh Ash Carter became Secretary of Defense.
41:56
And, it was started off an insight that Ash Carter had when he was just Professor Ash Carter in 2001, when he wrote an article Keeping the Technological Edge that was quite prescient about uh strategic trends.
42:09
So, he noted at the end of the Cold War that federal research and development was essentially flatlining at the exact moment that the technology economy was taking off on a rocket-like trajectory straight up.
42:20
And so, by the time he arrived into office, and he forecast this in his 2001 article, the market capitalization of all the major tech companies, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, were each themselves individually bigger than the entire defense industry combined.
42:38
So, what does that tell you?
42:42
That tells you that the locus of innovation has shifted away from military labs, away from DARPA, which used to be generations ahead in technology, to the commercial technology ecosystem.
42:53
The problem is that the entire defense procurement system and the Pentagon's line of vision are tuned in to the military R&D labs and to the defense primes.
43:01
But, if they're no longer the ones coming up with the leading-edge technology, the Pentagon is not structured to become, in Ash's words, a fast follower of the commercial market.
43:10
So, Defense Innovation Unit, the Pentagon's first-ever Silicon Valley office, started by Ash, the first Secretary of Defense to visit Silicon Valley in over 20 years, was an attempt to pivot the entire US military to be able to more quickly adopt commercial technology, which was clearly starting to outpace the technology being built by by the defense primes.
43:33
And just to clarify, your role in all of this has been You know, as a as an aide to the Pentagon, I worked on a lot of technology issues, so I was asked by Secretary Carter to run the working group that created the concept for Defense Innovation Unit that he then launched, and just a few months after launching it, he asked Raj Shah and myself to come take it over.
43:56
He in fact ordered me that I would be moving from my then present position on the National Security Council to California, which I promptly did.
44:03
I had to buy more pairs of jeans.
44:05
I had I had one pair of jeans and five suits and I went out and bought five five pairs of five more pairs of jeans and was ready for Silicon Valley and started in 2016.
44:17
Began a really exciting couple of years at the helm of Defense Innovation Unit where we among other things pioneered a new way to buy technology that was much faster and proved through a number of very successful pilots that you could actually use technology on the battlefield in decisive ways.
44:33
And is there some reason in the incentives to think Unit X won't ossify?
44:38
Or is your view simply for now newness is enough?
44:40
It may well ossify, but then we'll create a new structure yet again.
44:45
Well, there is this, you know, Hegelian dialectic, right?
44:47
In the history of defense agencies.
44:50
And so DARPA was created originally to create to solve a crisis in in space flight because the Air Force wasn't up to up to snuff.
45:01
It actually spent some years in the wilderness before before becoming the dynamic institution that we know it today.
45:07
So far the trajectory of Unit X has been very successful.
45:11
And part of the reason for that is, you know, we have people that come there kind of like DARPA for a few years at a time on rotation.
45:18
And they, you know, our project managers are are very focused on getting things done.
45:25
And and oh by the way, we've pioneered a way to buy technology at Silicon Valley speed.
45:29
So, you know, if you want to go buy a fighter jet or an aircraft carrier or a military radio, you're looking at using the federal acquisition rules, this sort of Old Testament-like system of regulations.
45:41
Negotiating a contract typically takes 18 to 24 months.
45:44
If you're a startup, you know, that simply doesn't work, right?
45:49
Because you have to show profitability before your next round of venture investment which you're going to raise inside of that timeline, which is why when we arrived in the Valley in 2016, venture capitalist would actively pull funding from startups that tried to go after government contracts because they knew in the end it wouldn't be profitable.
46:07
So, DIU had to figure out a way to break through that.
46:09
And we did it through the ingenuity of a single person.
46:14
And this is a story, a heroic story of how one person can really affect change in in the Department of Defense, a 3 million-person organization.
46:21
And her name was Lauren Dealy.
46:23
We met her when she was 29 years old.
46:25
Um she's an acquisition specialist, stays up all night reading the newly released National Defense Authorization Act, another dictionary-size tome of law.
46:34
And our fourth day on the job, she comes to Raj and I and says, "Hey, I found this sentence in section 815, and I think I think it's a giant loophole we can use to create a whole new system of contracting."
46:47
And Raj and I say say, "You know, this sounds fantastic.
46:48
This is the biggest problem we have to come up with a bigger system of contracting.
46:52
If we can't do that, uh DIU will fail."
46:56
And Lauren says, "Well, great.
46:56
Well, here's the 20-page white paper that I wrote about it."
47:00
So, quite literally the next day, Lauren and I got on a flight to Washington.
47:02
And we met in rapid order with the head of acquisition policy for the department, with the head acquisition lawyer for the department, and with the Department of Defense General Counsel.
47:12
And they all agreed um and Secretary Carter blessed uh a whole new regime of using other transaction authorities, this Apollo era uh little-used contracting mechanism, to let contracts in between 30 and 60 days.
47:28
And so, in 2 weeks, we got the department to declare DIU could use this new method.
47:32
And in the 8 years since Lauren had that idea, $70 billion of technology has been acquired by the Department of Defense using the method that she pioneered.
47:42
Does China have something at all like Unit X?
47:47
China has something different.
47:47
Um so, in their system, uh they don't have one unit that is specifically focused on acquiring an technology from uh the best startups and technology firms in China.
48:00
They They have a again this doctrine announced in about 2015 of civil-military fusion that mandates that if you were producing technology that might be dual-use, that might have a military application, that you have to notify the People's Liberation Army and perhaps a PLA officer will come and join your board to watch that technology advance and if they see a use case, they might decide to pull that technology into the military.
48:23
So, in the sense of their command economy, that is how they are deciding to ingest technology.
48:28
And how well how well do they do procurement, in your opinion?
48:35
You look at it, you think wow, that's impressive, or you think ah, they're they're doing well for other reasons, but their procurement is screwed up like ours.
48:42
Well, you know, I think any large public institution or large government institution, whether you're communist or capitalist, is going to have inefficiencies in it, I think.
48:51
The Chinese have plenty of inefficiencies, but I think what's different is, you know, they have observed our military very carefully, really ever since the first Gulf War, when the precision strike complex, as it's called, really became debuted on the on the global stage.
49:08
And and the whole world saw us on CNN dropping bombs down chimneys, right?
49:12
And so today, similarly, the entire complex of Chinese universities that have that study national security and military institutes are looking very closely at Ukraine.
49:28
By the time the book was published, I think we we had caught something like 120 papers, academic papers, being published in the Chinese literature about the Ukraine war.
49:37
Very clearly seeing the decisive use of Starlink, calling for a Chinese version of Starlink, calling for Chinese kinetic and non-kinetic means of jamming low earth orbit space technology.
49:50
So, what's different about their procurement system is however good or bad it is, it's geared at producing the exact kind of technology that will that will find the chinks in our own armor and could if we have to go to war in a Taiwan scenario and other scenario prove to be a potentially catastrophic awakening to the US military.
50:12
Is Unit X a dog-friendly office?
50:15
Highly important question.
50:20
You know, I arrived out in California with my golden retriever and I was jealous of Secretary Leon Panetta who both as CIA director and as secretary of defense brought Bravo his golden retriever to the office.
50:30
And you know, Bravo he he he's proud to say was one of two two canines cleared into the bin Laden operation, the other one being the German Shepherd that flew on the helicopters into Abbottabad.
50:43
So, I thought here we are in you know, we're in Silicon Valley.
50:44
We're supposed to come up with an office with a different culture.
50:47
Let's make our office dog-friendly.
50:51
And we did, but we had to go to war to do it.
50:53
So, we were in a National Guard building and there was some colonel there in charge of you know, he's kind of our our landlord.
51:00
And even though there's no regulation against having a dog-friendly office in the Department of Defense and we had published you know, our dog policy, he threatened to evict us unless we ended our policy.
51:12
His his last name started with F, so we referred to him as Colonel Fear.
51:16
And so our against the dogs. He's against the dogs. He's against the AU.
51:20
He's an old school colonel.
51:20
He doesn't like any of this.
51:24
So, how do we not get evicted?
51:25
Well, we figure out he's retiring in 6 months.
51:31
So, what we do is we we tell him, oh, you know, we don't actually have a dog-friendly policy.
51:34
We have a service dog policy and we're unable based on the reasons our Air Force physician has declared for each individual to have the three dogs in the office that we had uh through HIPAA reasons to tell you why, but we can assure you that uh uh HIPAA-compliant paperwork has been filed uh filed declaring these service dogs.
51:56
So, we got our dog-friendly office and Colonel Fear went off to retire and uh not be heard from again.
51:59
What's the biggest problem with a dog-friendly office?
52:05
I You know, there are some people that are allergic to dogs, and so um that's why many major tech companies uh that that are dog-friendly will have um dog-free areas.
52:13
Um but uh in in my view, um you know, especially now at at a moment when when offices are are uh empty in most of the country, why not make them more fun?
52:23
And uh boy, it was fun to watch Secretary Mattis come in who himself loves dogs and be greeted by my golden retriever.
52:30
And boy, was it even more fun to see crusty three- and four-star generals that were very skeptical that Silicon Valley had anything to offer to to to first see my golden retriever, uh and then see the woman who briefed our software demos whose hair was blue.
52:46
Uh and by the end of the day, uh nonetheless, be really impressed by the technology we were putting in front of them.
52:51
And you wrote a political science dissertation at Cambridge on governmental commissions, right? Yes.
52:58
What is it you learned from that dissertation that helped you do Unit X military procurement more innovation?
53:05
Well, I I'm really grateful I got the chance to go do a a PhD, and in particular to do it in the British system rather than the American system. Um why?
53:13
A shorter, that's always nicer, 3 years rather than 5, but rather than spend all my time studying for qualifying exams, I actually got to read the classic tomes of political science and sociology and understand them.
53:25
And I'm so grateful for that chance, and I ended up studying uh breakdowns in the national security state.
53:32
So, what do you do after a catastrophic breakdown that the political system, the regular political system can't uh contain.
53:37
And I ended up studying government commissions, in part because I had had the chance early in my career to serve around a couple after-action reports and investigations.
53:49
The first my first job out of college in 2003 was for the Space Shuttle Columbia accident investigation, a look at not NASA's safety culture, not only what was the physical cause of the Columbia disaster, but what was the organizational cause behind the physical cause.
54:05
My second job was a chance to go to Iraq and work on a team of historians writing an official history of the reconstruction.
54:14
Another major breakdown in American foreign policy.
54:18
In fact, I've gone on to specialize in in disaster and a few other areas.
54:20
I wrote the Obama administration's after-action report of Ebola.
54:24
I used to joke that, you know, if I should have been in your office, you were really having a bad day.
54:30
But I what I learned is that, you know, expertise is often wrong.
54:35
And settled notions of how business should be done is also often wrong.
54:39
And those settled notions often kill people.
54:44
And especially when they kill people, that's a strong signal that it's time to go back and take a fresh look at everything.
54:50
And to always be curious, always be skeptical, and always be as rigorous as you can because established ways of thinking don't often evolve in you know, ways fast enough to accommodate changing circumstances.
55:03
What is it we need a commission for today where it might maybe plausibly plausibly succeed?
55:11
Well, the political science literature divides commissions into three types.
55:16
The type that you don't want to be on is a disaster management commission.
55:18
So this is where oh, there's a giant political problem.
55:23
We're going to name a blue ray blue ribbon commission that will never be heard from again to take the blame off politicians.
55:29
The hardest kind of commission to be on is an agenda commission.
55:32
is an agenda commission. So an agenda commission like the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence wasn't created after a 9/11 or a catastrophic breakdown, but nevertheless is a body that is going to have the
55:45
bipartisan insight insights and and and support and the expertise to tackle AI, a really complex issue that spans government that at least when the AI commission was created the government wasn't in a position to itself take on in a really rigorous way. The most
55:59
The most effective commissions are what are called crisis commissions.
56:03
The 9/11 Commission is a classic example.
56:05
They happen in the aftermath of a giant political rupture.
56:10
When everybody knows there's been a huge breakdown where there's more openness to look freshly.
56:18
And that commission went pretty well.
56:20
Well, a very high percentage of its recommendations were adopted and and more than that it forcefully brought into the public light information that never otherwise would have made it out about who knew what and when.
56:33
So, I'm a strong believer in in commissions as a form of government.
56:40
You know, the the British government has them much more frequently than we do. They don't always work.
56:46
I mean, an interesting historical anecdote the first commission in the US was actually the Whiskey Rebellion Commission. It didn't work.
56:51
George Washington had to get on his horse and ride west before the rebellion in Pennsylvania broke up.
56:57
But as a form of gathering concentrated expertise for a short problem to dive deep on a topic, I think they're very powerful very powerful instruments. And final question.
57:08
What is it you want to learn about next? Anything.
57:15
You know, I got a chance this spring to work at Anthropic in a policy residency working both on AI safety and AI and national security.
57:24
And it was a short-term residency.
57:24
I was only there for a few months, but I am incredibly enchanted by generative AI and I cannot believe based on my time inside a frontier model lab what is just around the corner.
57:39
So, I want to learn everything I possibly can about how to steer, democratize, and make safe this incredibly powerful new wave of technology that's about to crash down upon us.
57:52
And how would you describe what you think is around this corner?
57:57
Well, um you know, on the national security front, you know, there's been a heck of a lot of conversations about, you know, is is AI sort of as dangerous as the next nuclear bomb and you know, everybody at Frontier Labs, you know, went out last summer and watched Oppenheimer.
58:14
And it's interesting just, you know, culturally coming from the national security community where it was my day job to look at really awful stuff, right?
58:24
To get up every morning and before the chairman came into the office or on that security council, read the morning intelligence brief about all the things, all the awful things going on in the world every day.
58:37
So, I look at AI as a technology that is not at all like nuclear.
58:40
I I never think it's going to achieve the sort of zero to one, you know, point technology as we would call it that nuclear is today where you either have the have have have a bomb or or you don't.
58:55
It's going to be much more diffuse.
58:55
It's going to be much more a part of the commercial economy.
58:59
It's going to be much more a question of, you know, do you have an iPhone 15 versus an iPhone 12?
59:08
You know, do you have the most advanced AI versus AI that's a little bit older or maybe from an open source model.
59:13
And because of that, as a international, you know, relations theorist and as the literature would suggest, it's not going to be like nuclear weapons.
59:24
It's not going to create sudden disequilibria in the international system.
59:28
The uh It's going to be much more shades of gray, I think, and gradations.
59:32
And that's good, because it means that we will have time among nations to find new equilibria without, hopefully, finding ourselves in sudden disequilibria that could create an incentive for one nation to start a war against another.
59:47
Again, the new book is Unit 731 how the Pentagon and Silicon Valley are transforming the future of war by Raj M.
59:54
Shah and Christopher Chris, thank you very much. Thank you, Tyler.