April 3, 2025 • 55 mins
Christopher Kirchhoff helped launch a Defense Department office that aimed to bring Silicon Valley technology to the US military. Christopher’s problem is this: How can the giant bureaucracy that is the US military keep up with technological change?
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. If you go to the front line of the
war in Ukraine and you look up, there's a very
good chance you'll see a drone. Could be a friendly drone,
could be an enemy drone, could be a reconnaissance drone,
or it could be a drone that is trying to
(00:36):
kill you. The war in Ukraine is the first war
in history where huge numbers of cheap drones powered largely
by commercial grade hardware and open source software, are playing
a central role. This technological change has profound implications. It
gives smaller countries like Ukraine new ways to fight, and
(00:57):
it means the militaries of big traditional powers military is
built on twentieth century technologies like tanks and aircraft carriers,
need to radically change just to keep up. I'm Jacob Goldstein,
and this is what's your problem. My guest today is
Christopher Kirkoff. Nine years ago, Christopher helped to start the
(01:20):
Defense Innovation Unit, a Defense Department office in Silicon Valley.
He currently works as an advisor there. Christopher says, in
many ways, the US military has failed to keep up
with the way military technology has changed. That fundamentally is
the problem. DIU is trying to solve how can the
giant bureaucracy that is the US military catch up with
(01:42):
the latest military technology. Christopher is a civilian. He had
a bunch of national security related jobs in the Obama administration,
and he recently co wrote a book about his work
at the Defense Innovation Unit, the DIIU. Christopher and I
talk about the book and the DIIU later in the interview,
(02:02):
but to start, we talked about the weapons and tech
being used in the war in Ukraine. So, I mean,
it's in some ways like the war in Ukraine. It
is some version of the war or the kind of
war you've been thinking about for a long time, years
and years.
Speaker 2 (02:21):
Well, I've always looked at Ukraine, you know, at sort
of two levels. The first, of course, is that it's
just a very tragic and frankly needless war. You know,
there's there's very few reasons right ever to go to war,
and this is a particularly stupid war that's just going
to cost a lot of young men and women their lives.
(02:45):
So it's tragic, and I'm terribly sorry for the suffering
of the Ukrainian people, and frankly the suffering of the
young conscripted Russian soldiers as well, So let me just
say that to start. But the second way that I
look at Ukraine as you know, essentially a laboratory of war.
We saw in you know, a decade ago already the
(03:06):
rise of commercial technologies that it was it was obvious
could be weaponized and weaponized at scale. And I mean
I remember sitting on the e ring of the Pentagon
watching YouTube videos of drones, you know, first of all,
quad copters flying around, you know, first sinkly, then in pairs,
then doing dances, and it was really easy to imagine
(03:29):
that at some point in the future those drones could
themselves also be carrying payloads of various kinds. And not
only that, but I mean these are drones that you know,
you could order on Amazon, right, they were a few
hundred dollars, so they were incredibly inexpensive to begin experimenting with.
So all the ingredients were there for a complete revolution
(03:52):
in the tools with which which war could be fought,
and they came together kind of all at once in
a way when Russian armored columns began and advancing in Ukraine. Right.
Speaker 1 (04:08):
I mean, it's it's kind of easy to forget now,
but it at the time when Russia invaded Ukraine, seems
like the basic conventional wisdom was, oh, giant country with
a huge army invading, They're going to win in a week.
And that didn't happen. I mean, what what role did
(04:28):
this sort of new set of technologies play in allowing
Ukraine to defend itself.
Speaker 2 (04:34):
Well, you know that the technologies actually came into play
even before the invasion commenced. And one of the most
visible ways that came into play is I mean, this
is the first war in a way where there's so
many private imagery companies that have their own satellite constellations
that are beaming back to Earth high resolution imagery, resolution
(04:56):
of the order of what would have been, you know,
a Cold War spy satellite just a few years ago. Uh.
And this this importantly, this, these images weren't just going
to you know, the US government or to other militaries.
They were available to anybody that wanted to see them.
And so when Putin and the Kremlin was issuing statements
(05:18):
to the effect that no, they weren't going to invade Ukraine,
in fact, they were demobilizing the Russian military and preparing
to ship material back to Russia. By rail. The Biden
administration was able to release commercial imagery that showed no,
in fact, there's armored columns lining up on the border
(05:38):
ready to go.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
Uh huh. I mean the fact that it was commercial
means you didn't even need the Biden administration, right like
anybody who paid for a subscription could see that the
Russian tanks were there.
Speaker 2 (05:50):
Right exactly, and so and this carried on. Then so
the invasion begins and the Ukrainians not only have eyes
and ears from this commercial data fees, not just imagery,
but also radio frequency intelligence, and that gets paired quickly
(06:11):
with starlink at a moment when you know, the Russians
are using very advanced cyber attacks to attempt to take
down not only the Internet in Ukraine, but also the
command and control structure of the Ukrainian military. And what
then happened next was really quite unique and amazing. The
Ukrainian government had become quite adept at offering digital services
(06:36):
to its citizens, both through online websites and through a
smartphone app that the government built. In fact, Zelensky actually
campaigned as a somebody who would bring in a new
generation of digital services, whether it was taxes or you know,
the ability to incorporate online. So the Ukrainian government very
(06:56):
quickly reconfigure a smartphone app that Ukrainians used every day
in their ordinary lives to allow Ukrainians to be able
to send in spot reports of you know, I just
saw a tank column moving past my town.
Speaker 1 (07:10):
You basically just pull out your phone and open your
app and instead of whatever, calling an uber, you say,
I just saw a tank.
Speaker 2 (07:17):
Well, yeah, so the nickname for this became Uber for artillery.
It literally was possible for citizens to file a spot
report that went right away to a command center in
the Ministry of Defense, and artillery and other weapons were
literally dispatched on that information.
Speaker 1 (07:36):
So, okay, So that's the sort of initial state of play.
And then there's this evolution, right it seems like it's
three years from now, a long time. There has been
this really intense yeah, evolution, innovation right on both sides.
Talk to me about that. How has how has technology
(07:57):
driven this sort of rapid evolution of war fighting over
the last few years.
Speaker 2 (08:02):
Well, Ukraine has been described the Ukrainian military has been described,
you know, as a as a military that already came
with a silicon valley wing attached to it because Ukraine
over the last two decades has redefined itself as a
country of programmers. It has a large endemic IT industry
(08:23):
that was there before the war, and the Ukrainian government
was really smart in that it mobilized, of course, military
age males to serve It really is a citizen army
in that respect, but it took anybody that had engineering
or programming skills and it allowed them either to work
for a private company developing technology or to work for
(08:45):
the military developing technology. And so from the first weeks
of the war you had an incredible number of engineers
spitballing on how to develop indigenous technology that could take
on the Russians. And this mattered because as soon as
the Russians got their advanced electronic warfare systems to the
(09:08):
front and move them forward and turn them on even
advanced Western drones that either Ukraine already had in this
inventory or rushed in and the opening weeks of the
war became essentially ineffective because they were not programmed nor
did they have the sensors on them to be able
to defeat the extremely advanced Russian countermeasures that were immediately
(09:31):
rolled out.
Speaker 1 (09:32):
So the Russians were essentially jamming the drones in some way.
They had some kind of technology that rendered sort of
off the shelf or even military grade drones ineffective.
Speaker 2 (09:43):
The jamming was so powerful that if you were in
Kiev and you say you were on the third or
fourth form of a hotel and you tried to order
an uber your location on the map in the Uber app,
which show up in the middle of the Indian Ocean.
Because the GPS jamming was so effective that even in cities,
(10:04):
it wasn't possible to pick up a reliable signal that
you know, cities that were hundred miles from the front.
So at the front, the electromagnetic spectrum was just flooded
with energy and that caused right away, it touched off
this technology race to invent drones that could essentially fly
(10:28):
on their own, even through incredibly intense jamming. And so
the Ukrainians and it was remarkable to go see when
my co author Radshaw and I got a chance to
visit Ukraine a year and a half ago, we went
to a number of drone companies and they have essentially
the Ukrainians in a matter of months, recreated the entire
(10:51):
American Cold War precision strike complex that we first got
to know so well in the original Gulf War, where
we all of a sudden were dropping bombs down chimneys.
So the Ukrainians have an essence, used a combination of
open source software and low cost hardware to recreate everything
(11:15):
from the function of our a wax planes. These are
the airline looking airplanes with the giant raidardomes on top
that provide a kind of God's eye view of the battlefield.
So they literally have drones whose sole purpose is to
keep track of large parts of the battlefield to other
(11:36):
smaller surveillance drones that will go take pictures of a
specific area that the Ukrainians want to target. They'll relay
that imagery back kind of almost like miniature YouTube spy
planes flying and dropping film canisters and whatnot, and they'll
quickly be able to then load the images of Russian
(11:57):
targets that they want to hit up onto killer drones
that will then use image recognition and terrain following software
to go hunt and find the target. It's with fully
you know autonomy on fully autonomous routes right that don't
require phoning home for them either to navigate or have
(12:18):
permission to engage. On top of that, you actually have
the Ukrainians using open source software to fuse different sensor streams,
so you can have a Ukrainian commander that on a
tablet computer in front of them has data feeds from
surveillance drones that that are relaying video in real time
to maps of the electronic warfare spectrum. You know. So
(12:45):
it's really incredible what they've been able to do for
essentially pennies on the dollar of what the American military
is spent to recreate the same technological stack.
Speaker 1 (12:56):
So you went to Ukraine a year and a half
ago or so. You mentioned a couple of the places
you visited. One of them is sort of a had
been the Ukrainian version of like best Buy right and
had been transfer warmed. Tell me about that.
Speaker 2 (13:11):
Yeah, it was wild running around the city of Kiev
visiting a number of the places that the government had
commandeered for the war effort. And so one of these
places was an all literal you know, Ukraine's version of
Best Buy, a big box store essentially on the wall
were still signed saying you know, televisions, appliances, you know,
(13:34):
there were ads for washing machines, you know, on the walls,
like walking to the Best Buy, but instead of there
being a whole bunch of electronics for you to buy,
there were benches, work benches laid out in an assembly
a line style rows and this particular electronics store was
being used to mass produce quad copter Kamakazi drones. So
(13:55):
at one end of the assembly line you would start
with the frame of the drone and by the time
he got to the other end, you would have a
completely working drone with communications software ready to be mated
with either an anti personnel charge or a shaped charge
to go through armor, you know, a couple of kilogram
(14:16):
charge that would create these inexpensive mass produced quad copters
into quite potent weapons.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
When you say a charge, should I think bomb? It's
basically a little.
Speaker 2 (14:27):
Bomb, right, yeah, larger than a grenade.
Speaker 1 (14:29):
Yeah. And then it would so go out to the
front and they'd put the bomb on it and they'd
go crash it into a Russian tank or something like that.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
They sure would. And this goes back to the incredibly
novel hybrid warfare that we're seeing in Ukraine, where yes,
there are you know, in many respects, the war in
Ukraine is a. There is a lot of continuities with
the First and the Second World War. There are trench lines,
there is artillery, there are tanks and mechanize differenttry that
(15:01):
are moving around. But at the same time in the
trenches are drone pilots and they are launching armed drones
and sense drones that are watching enemy movements behind enemy lines.
And so the battle you know in World War One
or World War Two typically happened at the front where
forces actually came into contact with one another. Today, Joan
(15:25):
Wolfire is pushing the battle behind the front.
Speaker 1 (15:28):
It makes the front sort of more porous exactly.
Speaker 2 (15:31):
So if you were, example, you know, a Russian armor unit,
and you're trying to advance into Ukrainian territory, you have
to bring your tanks and your armored personal carriers with
your infantry towards the front. Well, the Ukrainian has gone
in the habit of using their inexpensive kamikaze drones to
(15:51):
loiter and track armored personal carriers, and at the moment
at which troops would disembark the armored personal carrier to
move towards the front, they would strike. So this you know,
lawn range or sort of short range precisions. Strike has
completely changed how the war is being fought. It's being
fought unlike any other war in modern times.
Speaker 1 (16:14):
So the war has been going on for a few years.
Both Russia and Ukraine have clearly been learning and you know,
developing new technology at this incredibly rapid pace. How does
the war in Ukraine look different now than it did
three years ago or two years ago shortly after it started.
Speaker 2 (16:31):
Yeah, well, we're you know, back to a place that's
a well known place to historians, to military historians, where
you know, there was an initial explosion of conflict in
the in the confused invasion, where massive Russian armored columns
(16:52):
rushed in at multiple points in the country. They were
ultimately beaten back to a certain point. Those lines, you know,
over time came to freeze. Because each side has very
potent precision strike weapons, it's very hard to change those lines.
In other words, the defense in a way has an advantage.
(17:14):
It's very very hard to use offensive mass to gain territory,
which is why we've seen the battle lines not shift
all that much after they settled in the initial months
of the year. But what's going on behind them has
been this incredible combat through cycles of innovation, who can
(17:35):
come up with better electronic countermeasures, who can come up
with the next generation of drones that will defeat them?
And so both the Russians and the Ukrainians have been
innovating behind the front lines and then bringing that technology forward.
Speaker 1 (17:48):
Does the world look different in some way now than
it did a couple of years ago? Or is it
different on such a subtle level, like the gpsgmming is
better and the countermeasures are better, and so the net
effect is the same.
Speaker 2 (18:02):
I say, it's different in pretty dramatic ways. So today
there are such effect of small scale Kamakazi drones that
they can effectively hunt individuals. So we are truly today
in a black Mere episode where if you're a civilian
(18:22):
at a border city near the front, or a soldier
at the front, you are in danger of every time
you leave the bunker or leave your house literally being
pursued by a drone that's trying to kill you.
Speaker 1 (18:37):
I mean, how do you survive a kamakazi drone attack?
Speaker 2 (18:40):
You essentially have to take cover and so oftentimes you
know the sound of a drone buzzing, you know, And
this is a challenge, right because on every square mile
of the front, they're probably a dozen or more drones
in the air at any given time.
Speaker 1 (18:56):
So if you're fighting this where there's basically always a
drone flying over your head and maybe it's coming to
kill you personally, and maybe it's not.
Speaker 2 (19:04):
The airspace on both sides of the lines incredibly overrun
with drones. I mean they are literally smacking it to
each other in the air. It's like flocks of birds
at this point. So so no, the changes we're seeing, frankly,
are not subtle at all. They're quite dramatic.
Speaker 1 (19:22):
So what does the US learn from the war in Ukraine.
Speaker 2 (19:27):
It's woken the United States and our allies up in
two very profound ways. The first is that, you know,
it turns out we had not been stockpiling adequate material
for war, whether it was howards to shells or anti
tank missiles or sophisticated rockets we had basically you know,
(19:48):
ran to the storage cupboard and found it to be
almost bare. And that's very alarming. You know, it happened
because of course munitions, when the budget gets tired, it's
easy to say, oh, we'll buy more next year. So
that's how we ended up in that situation. So we
discovered a crisis actually of military readiness on our side,
and we discovered a manufacturing base more than that that
(20:09):
was not easily able to be mobilized because many factories
that produce these weapons had been idle for years or
even shuttered. And in a world in which supply chains
are threatened globally, if you can't assume the seas are
going to be saved for transit, you have to be
able to manufacture this weaponry within your borders. But there
(20:30):
was an even more profound wake up call, and let's
just go back to the use of Kamakazi drones. We
gave the Ukrainians very early in the war and one
A one Abraham's battle tanks. These are the most sophisticated
battle tank in the world. We've all seen pictures of them.
You can be driving down the highway in an Abram's
(20:50):
battle tank at seventy miles an hour and you can
decide which window of a skyscraper to put around through them.
It's an incredible piece of hardware. And almost all thirty
one of those tanks have been destroyed or disabled by
Russian Kamakazi drones that each cost no more than a
few thousand dollars a piece.
Speaker 1 (21:07):
And what's the tank cost the tankst.
Speaker 2 (21:09):
Oh gosh, I don't know, twelve or fifteen million dollars
or maybe more. So that tells me another military strategist,
that if you're an army who bought a lot of tanks,
and you presume that your military strength comes from those tanks,
you could easily be surprised by an adversary using really
(21:29):
an expensive Kama Coze drones. In other words, the era
of manned mechanized warfare is over. In the same way
that during the First World War, tanks showed us that
the cavalry age was coming to a close, we are
now at the end of the era of the battle tank.
Speaker 1 (21:47):
So you're sayings, tanks now are about as useful as
horses were in nineteen fifteen. Yes, what do we do
about that? What does that mean for the United States?
Speaker 2 (22:04):
Well, the reason why my cousin I wrote a book
all about just how far behind the US military finds
itself is that this phenomena of less expensive technology overcoming
legacy weapons systems, you know, the sort of building blocks
(22:25):
of the Cold War American military isn't true just for tanks,
And in fact we're already seeing this in Ukraine, where
the Russian black sea fleet is today being kept in
port by Ukrainians ingenious use of autonomous boats that are
carrying payloads of high explosives that have rammed in and
(22:50):
sunk the largest Russian ship, the Moskova on the black seat.
So the naval strategists called the Russian fleet now being
a fleet in being, it's a fleet kept in port
because of cheap autonomous technology. So, in other words, many
of the Americans most powerful militaries systems, aircraft carriers, battle tanks,
(23:12):
battleships may now no longer be as effective as they
were just a few years ago.
Speaker 1 (23:19):
I mean so in terms of changing the equilibrium. Is
the effect of essentially autonomous technology drones and then ship
drones to give more power to countries with less money.
Is that one effect?
Speaker 2 (23:33):
Well, there's two effects. So the first and most obvious
effect is that a country with fewer financial resources can
amass larger degrees of military power. But there's a second
and more insidious effect, which is that militaries are inherently
conservative institutions for a couple of reasons. One, war is
(23:55):
a very unforgiving teacher. And it's almost impossible through just
simulations alone to actually replicate combat conditions. And so you
can test, you can test new systems all you want,
but you won't actually have the com evident. So they're
going to work in the way you suspect them to
work or want them to work until you go to war.
So this is what leads militaries to almost always perpetually
(24:18):
be overfocused on winning the last war rather than winning
the war. That's the cop.
Speaker 1 (24:26):
Still to come on the show. Why the US military
is not ready to fight a war right now according
to Chris, and what it might take to change that. So, okay,
there is this problem right the US military is not
(24:48):
really keeping up with technological change. And this is a
problem that Christopher has been working on for a while now.
It's a key part of the reason he was tapped
to help launch the Defense Innovation Unit back in twenty sixteen,
and to kind of set the scene here right to
give a sense of what he and his colleagues were
up against, what they were trying to change when they
launched the Defense Inovation Unit. I asked Christopher about this
(25:11):
story that he and his co author tell in their book,
it's the story of something they saw at the US
military's Combined Air Operations Center in Katar.
Speaker 2 (25:22):
So the Combined Air Operations Center is this nerve center
that is in charge of running all air operations in
the Middle East in an area that's actually larger than
the lower forty eight States. And so any plane, any missile,
any air strike that goes on in this extraordinary piece
(25:45):
of geography is the responsibility of a set of airmen
and women that operate in a base in Qatar. And
in twenty sixteen, you'll remember, there was a crisis in
the Middle East. Isis was storming through countries, was encircling
(26:05):
the Iraqi population in Mosul, was trying to prosecut the
largest genocide of the twenty first century against the Ziti
people who were trapped on Mountain Jar. And these civilians
were kept alive only by an extraordinary campaign of US
air strikes. We were striking ISIS forces every few minutes
(26:28):
twenty four to seven for weeks on end, in a
bombing campaign that's the highest intensity in history. And to
sustain a bombing campaign of this you have to have,
of course fighter aircraft and surveillance, but you also have
to have refueling tankers. These fighter jets are gas guzzlers.
They need to refill their gas tanks every forty minutes
(26:49):
or so, and to do that they have to mate
up with air refueling tankers. And this is actually a
very complex thing to figure out because fighters come in
different types, they refuel at different altitudes, they have different
nozzles on them, and if you have hundreds of aircraft
a day aloft operating in combat support roles, you need
(27:12):
dozens of tankers to refuel them. So how did the
Air Force men and women in uniform and guitar orchestrate
the complex planning of tanker routes. Well, they used a whiteboard.
We showed up in twenty sixteen and found people essentially
(27:34):
operating like we did in World War Two, except instead
of having a chalkboard and magnets, we had a whiteboard.
And they were having to do all these calculations by hand,
which took an enormous number of hours. Why by hand
because the computer program that was supposed to do this
had broken and they were waiting for an upgrade. But
(27:55):
they had been waiting seven years for an upgrade that
one of the large defense companies was in charge of
developing that was way of rebudget and way behind schedule.
Speaker 1 (28:05):
They'd been waiting seven years for an upgrade, and they
were in the middle of this like multi multi million
dollar command center the US had built, coordinating hundreds of
flights all the time.
Speaker 2 (28:16):
It gets worse. So the minute that there's a deviation
from the plan, whether that's bad weather or you know,
unexpected combat operations in a different area than you'd plan
for now you have to redo the calculations on the fly.
So this is actually introducing a lot of unneeded risk
in our combat operations that that only puts it risk
(28:38):
the men and women of the US military, but also
puts it risk the forces on the ground that we're
trying to protect, where the civilians were trying to defend.
Speaker 1 (28:46):
You describe like somewhere in the process, there'd be like
somebody with one spreadsheet and then there was another spreadsheet,
but like the two spreadsheets couldn't like talk to each other, right,
so somebody had to read out the numbers to get
it from one spreadsheet to the other. You describe extra
refueling flights all the time because they couldn't, you know,
(29:07):
process the data fast enough essentially by hand.
Speaker 2 (29:10):
There, they had multiple different databases they had to manually
fuel fuse together. Somebody would literally stand behind the computer
operator to make sure they were typing in the numbers right,
and it would take fifty person hours to put together
the refueling plan for the next day. So we realized
this was an opportunity to show what Silicon Valley does best,
(29:32):
which is rapid iteration using software to create an optimization
algorithm that could solve this in seconds.
Speaker 1 (29:39):
Why hadn't they just fixed it? Let me ask the
naive question, like, it's not as a technical matter, it's
not a hard problem. What was the actual problem.
Speaker 2 (29:47):
So the problem is that the way the military bias
technology and the way Silicon Valley makes it, it's like
Mars and Venus, they're on two different planets. So the
military way, it's called a requirements based system of developing technology.
So a bunch of people sit in a windowless room
and they imagine, if I were to need a piece
(30:10):
of technology to help with air refueling, what should it
look like. And they write a bunch of specifications down
that they think would be great. So it's drawn up
in the abstract and then because contracting takes a lot
in the military. Oftentimes multiple generations of technology come along
before that system ever gets built, but of course it
has to be built through the original specifications.
Speaker 1 (30:32):
So the thing you get is basically a thing somebody
designed ten years ago or more, which is so obviously
a bad idea, right, And I mean certainly you make
a compelling case in the book that it's obviously a
bad idea. Is there any counter argument? Is there any
case for the way they do it?
Speaker 2 (30:52):
There is, And we have to be very sympathetic to
the people that are a part of the system because
the system actually was built to do something a little
bit different, and that is, you know, there aren't too
many companies that can build a nuclear powered aircraft carrier
or a submarine or a fifth generation stuff fighter, and
so you can't exactly go on Amazon and comparison price
(31:13):
shop if the're you're the US govern.
Speaker 1 (31:15):
There is no market. There is no market for a
nuclear sub in a conventional sense. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (31:20):
So the Defense Procurement system and the associated auditing system
that governs it is designed to save taxpayer dollar by
coming up with exceptionally precise specifications through which things must
be built and then a cost accounting system that is
meant to make sure that the taxpayer is never overcharged
(31:42):
from the one or two companies that can supply this technology.
So it was built for a different era, and in
terms of building aircraft carriers it actually does a reasonable job.
But commercial technology, there is a market. You don't have
to do it that way, and in fact, doing it
that way only slows you down.
Speaker 1 (32:00):
So okay, so you go, you see this terrible, inefficient, dangerous,
expensive technology failure that is happening at this base and cutter,
what do you do?
Speaker 2 (32:16):
Phone home? So my Cothur Raj got on the phone
that night and we immediately fedexed Imax and deployed a
few Air Force courders and a few coders from the
Silicon Valley out with the Pivotal to Qatar to sit
side by side with the airmen and women doing the
(32:39):
tanker planning and to build an automated app that they
could use eventually to push a button and have this done.
And it took just over a million dollars and just
over one hundred days to do it.
Speaker 1 (32:55):
And you said it saved a million dollars in excess
flights in like a couple of days.
Speaker 2 (33:00):
Right, So before the Air Force had to actually keep
a couple refueling tankers on standby to scramble because because
they weren't able to pivot the plan fast enough. And
of course, each time you scramble an enormous seven sixty
seven sized aircraft full of kerosene, it's energetically expensive. So
the tool that we use to optimize air tanker refueling
(33:24):
actually has saved the Air Force today something like I
think twenty four million gallons of kerosene a year. So
we're talking, you know, a lot of money of savings, right,
So this is this is a no brainer. Spend the money,
automate it. You get better mission outcomes for lower cost.
It's the Silicon Valley way of co developing technology with
the users, of iterating on a minimum, minimum viral product
(33:47):
and then adding features to that product as you go along.
Speaker 1 (33:51):
So this is like an early win in a fairly
straightforward way. I mean also worth noting that having the
coders go sit with the people who are using the
thing is like classic Silicon Valley, right, get close to
the user, see what they need, as opposed to like
have a guy in Washington ten years ago drop a
(34:11):
list of things he thinks people are going to need
ten years from now. Right, there are a couple of
new companies selling weapons and technology to the government that
seem worth talking about, that seem quite different than the
sort of twentieth century giant military contractors, Right, Pallanteer and Anderil.
(34:32):
Tell me about those two companies and how they fit
with this broader story.
Speaker 2 (34:36):
Well, it's important to recognize that the defense contracts we
have today, particularly the large ones that we know about,
the household names so Lockheed, Martin, Boeing, and so on
and so forth, they are really best thought of kind
of like utility companies, as highly regulated enterprises that are
(34:57):
not like traditional product companies because they have to adhere
to this massive system of cost accounting and auditing, this
two thousand page re regulation that governs everything they do.
And so in fact, the Pentagon has created these companies
and the way they operate, which is extraordinarily inefficient in
(35:19):
terms of how modern technology is produced by the commercial sector.
So what's so interesting about companies like Anderole, like Palanteer,
like shield Ai. They are traditional product companies in the
sense that Google and Microsoft are. They are unburdened by
having to erect this massive, separate accounting system to deal
(35:41):
with the Department of Defense bureaucracy because they are primarily
selling their technology through a completely different kind of contract
that we pioneered at DIU that our twenty nine year
old employee, Lauren Daily, came up with by seeing up
late at night and reading congressional legalation.
Speaker 1 (35:59):
Basically a way that the Department of Defense can buy
weapons without going through the traditional two thousand page process.
Speaker 2 (36:06):
Exactly.
Speaker 1 (36:07):
It's so amazing that that's what's driving the technological change
right in a way, not surprising but quite interesting, right
that this, this the process ends up driving the outcome
in a backwards way.
Speaker 2 (36:23):
Well, political scientists and sociologists all, you know, are always
keen to look at what you know, structures are operating,
and there is of course a whole discipline looks at
public institutions, which are constrained quite a bit more than
public companies. So once it isn't surprised. But what is
a surprise is the difference that one individual made in this.
So Lauren Daly, you know, the daughter of a tank driver,
(36:46):
somebody who entered the army as an acquisition specialist. As
her way of serving the country, figures out that there's
a loophole a Congress that a renegae Senate staffer is
just inserted in the National Defense Authorization Act that that
DAU can drive a truck through, and in a matter
of weeks, through some hustling at the Pentagon and the
(37:07):
support of thatsh, Carter codified this new method of procuring
technology called the Commercial Solutions Offering that essentially all want
us to negotiate with companies for a few weeks very openly,
in a very conversational way on commercial terms, so the
way they were used to negotiating and then to sign
a contract. So this was a game changer. And I
(37:27):
am so proud to report that since twenty sixteen to date,
about eighty billion dollars of technology acquisition by the departed
Defense has gone through this new mechanism. And in fact,
last week Trump Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth signed out
a memo mandating that all software bought by the Department
of Defense be acquired using this means, not the old
(37:51):
two thousand page, two thousand pageway.
Speaker 1 (37:55):
Huh So it's sort of the end of the old
pretty clearly bad way of buying software for the military.
Speaker 2 (38:04):
Yes, And so you know, there's two things to keep
in mind here. You know, one, it doesn't make sense
to use a two thousand page rule book to buy
things where you don't need it, where there's an actual market.
But the second thing that's really important. We would never
go to Microsoft or Amazon and ask them to build
an aircraft carrier. So why were we going to Raytheon
(38:26):
or Lockheed Martin and asking them or north remmen to
build software. It's not their core expertise. So the Pentagon,
in the last eight years, thanks in part to its
Silicon Valley office, has gotten a lot smarter about how
to procure advanced technology. And so fast forward to today.
The most exciting contract the Air Force is letting to
(38:47):
build up to potentially ten thousand supersonic autonomous drones that
will fight alongside our fifth generation man fighters. That contract
went to anderall In General Atomics, not de Boeing, not
to Lockheed, not to one of the prime So we're
seeing this complete sea change in who is being successful
(39:09):
at pulling down the biggest contracts with the most advanced
technology come out of the Department today.
Speaker 1 (39:16):
So do you think the US is ready to fight
a war right now, No, go on.
Speaker 2 (39:31):
We are in the unfortunate position of having made major
decatal investments in weapons systems that have essentially reached the
end of their lifespan.
Speaker 1 (39:48):
You mean like tank and aircraft carrier. Yes, not a
particular tank or aircraft carrier, but just any tank or
aircraft carrier is now basically obsolete.
Speaker 2 (39:58):
And we have a three part challenge. We're not yet
exactly sure because we haven't experimented enough what technology to
buy to replace them. We're also not sure exactly how
to use that new technology and what the military calls
concepts of operation. So when we invented care aviation, that's
(40:20):
a whole new way of using aircraft to fight naval.
Speaker 1 (40:25):
Battles, you have to figure out what to do with
ten thousand supersonic drones.
Speaker 2 (40:30):
And the third problem we have is that once we
do figure out what technology to buy and what operating
concepts to insert them into, we have to scale that up.
Speaker 1 (40:41):
Is there not a fourth problem, which was we're still
spending billions and billions of dollars on weapons that you're
arguing aren't going to work, are obsolete.
Speaker 2 (40:51):
Yes, that is a fourth problem. The Biden administration shifted
less than one percent of the Department of Defense's procurement
budget towards autonomous.
Speaker 1 (41:01):
Weapons less than one percent, meaning basically.
Speaker 2 (41:03):
Zero, basically zero.
Speaker 1 (41:06):
Yes, I feel like that's a bigger problem than the
other three. And I mean that comes through in the
book in a way, right, like your antagonist in the book,
in a narrative sense, is not Russia or China or
isis right. It's bureaucrats. It's it's you know, you go
to Capitol Hill and somebody's like, we're going to take
(41:27):
your money away because you're not spending any money in Indiana,
and that's where my congressman is from. And it seems
like that is still a problem.
Speaker 2 (41:37):
It is, And you know, this is one of these
moments where the strategic environment is changing so fast and
anybody watching or reading the news knows it from what's
happening in Ukraine, what's happening in the Middleize, what's happening elsewhere.
And so we're in this situation where the ordinary way
we buy technology and manage the military won't work. If
(41:58):
we keep doing it, we're going to walk the plank.
So we're now in a fierce battle to outmaneuver our
own system to transform it before there's another common.
Speaker 1 (42:10):
Frankly, it's hard for me to imagine the kind of
change you're suggesting is needed. Like when I think of
how whatever Congress works, and how the country works, and
how the military works and how everything works, it's hard
for him to imagine. I mean, unless there was a war,
which I don't want to happen obviously, right, Like, I
don't know, what do you think is going to happen?
Speaker 2 (42:31):
Well, you know, to make a more optimistic case, there
are a lot of things that are now going in
our favor. Most fundamentally, there is a new consensus in
the Pentagon and in the Congress that we're in a
crisis and the way to solve it is to pivot
the way the Department of Defense buys technology and use
this technology. And at the same time, there's a new
(42:53):
commitment in industry. We have a very dynamic economy the
United States of America, with venture backed investment creating small
scale infusions of technology that scales up companies in incredible ways.
So since Defense Innovation Unit figure it out this more
seamless way to quickly buy technology and actually make the
(43:13):
government a good customer. In Silicon Valley, there's been about
two hundred and fifty billion dollars of venture funds now
in play to back defense tech startups like and Andro
Al's am on the most successful, but there are hundreds more.
So the market is already responding. And today there is
more dynamic invention going on in the defense tech sector
(43:36):
than I think anywhere else. And so if the consensus
in the Pentagon in Congress can actually be changed into
shifts in the budget, we will quickly beheaded in the
right direction.
Speaker 1 (43:51):
I was with you until you said, if consensus in
the Pentagon in Congress can be changed, right, that's like
there's so much money there and so much inertia, and
like the government seems quite bad in many domains at
changing when change is needed. That it seems I don't know,
(44:15):
you think that might happen. It seems unlikely to me.
Speaker 2 (44:18):
Well, you know, again to paint the optimist picture.
Speaker 1 (44:24):
Well, just for a sec what do you think? What
do you think is going to happen?
Speaker 2 (44:28):
I am worried that people now understand the problem, but
the pendulum of change is going to swing too slowly. Huh.
Speaker 1 (44:38):
So I read that you recently did a residence at Anthropic,
which is one of the big frontier AI companies that
may claude the large language model, And so I'm curious.
This is very interesting to me, Like what did you
learn there? Like, what do you know now that you
didn't know before you you were there?
Speaker 2 (45:01):
The United States is unquestionably right now ahead at least
by a little bit in artificial intelligence. So's it's a
technology that we're better at than anybody else. And so
I think that the sort of sixty four million dollar
question in terms of military strategy for the United States
is whether or not we can harness AI in designing
(45:22):
a new military because right now that is the one
thing that will give us an unquestioned advantage in the battlefield.
Speaker 1 (45:30):
I mean, more generally, how do you think about AI
in the future of war? I mean, what does it
mean for the equilibrium? And what does it mean for
the sort of relative abilities of big countries and small
countries and kind of you know, rogue actors, Like how
does it change the power dynamics?
Speaker 2 (45:51):
Well, I'm really glad you used the word equilibrium because
it's a it's a core concept in strategy. There's a
whole literature on something called strategic stability, and it's a
literature that comes out in part of the Cold War.
It's a literature that has to reckon with the counterintuitive
(46:13):
finding that the proliferation of nuclear weapons otherds, the more
countries that became nuclear powers, the less incidents of conflict
between them there were, so nuclear weapons, an incredibly dangerous technology,
in a strange way, actually made the world safer.
Speaker 1 (46:30):
So far, so far.
Speaker 2 (46:32):
Now, with this whole true, if everybody had a nuclear weapon,
probably not.
Speaker 1 (46:36):
Right, And there's also a tail risk where it's like,
maybe this was just the lucky whatever eighty years, but
go on, yeah, so far, so far.
Speaker 2 (46:45):
So I think that the question is what will AI
do to strategic stability? Will it actually enhance it in
the following sense of AI is clearly going to make
warfare much more destructive than it is today, and more
destructive systems will raise the cost of going to war.
(47:07):
And so if multiple countries have really advanced AI, even
if one country is a little bit ahead of the other,
that won't change the fact that either one going to
war starting a war will be massively costly. So it
could be that AI, as a very diffuse technology, actually
increases to deterrence, in effect creating a higher bar to
(47:32):
starting a war. The optimistic scenario, the truly optimistic scenario,
is that not only does AI the diffusion of AI
technology make great power war less likely, but because there
are going to be some bad actors that get a
hold of this stuff and go cause a RUCKUS, that's
actually going to increase the interest of nations like the
(47:55):
US and China working together to ensure they retain their
own sovereignty and moopolying the means of violence to keep
their citizens safe. So it could actually not only decrease
the likelihood of great power of war, it could increase
international cop ration because we desperately need it if we're
all going to stay safe. Now. There is, of course,
a darker alternative. One flavor of that darker alternative is
(48:18):
that there is a country that believes they have a
breakout uh uh you know AI, and that that changes
for them the calculus of wanting to go to war
because they think that they'll just be able to eke
out enough advantage that that they'll launch an attack. Also,
I mean there's another danger too. We have to remember that,
you know, Vietnam started because in part the US Navy
(48:43):
thought its destroyers were attacked in the Gulf of Talking,
leading the you know US Congress to pass the Golf
of Tonkin Resolutions, which later led to the deployment of
troops in Vietnam. Well, turns out the attack never happened.
It was just mass confusion. Uh, And so AI introduces
a lot more uncertainty into the battlefield. That that is
a risk, that is that is worth knowing. And then
(49:05):
truly dark scenario is that AI allows small grop groups
to project lethality in a way that's very hard to control.
Speaker 1 (49:13):
What do you what do you mean when you say that?
Speaker 2 (49:15):
What means that you could go by or make a
weapon for low cost that there is no that there
is no effective defense for, so that you could go
toe to toe, you know, with with the most advanced
police force or homeland security force in military and still
cause a bunch of damage. So that is indeed a
very legitimate worry. It always has been. AI would just
(49:37):
be the latest technological innovation to land in the hands
of bad actors that are looking to do bad things.
Speaker 1 (49:48):
We'll be back in a minute with the lightning round. Okay,
let's finish with the lightning round, which is going to
be a little lighter. It's going to be like then
(50:11):
the rest of this conversation. I read in a bio
of yours online that you have backpacked in over thirty countries,
including a trek from Moscow to Singapore overland, and I'm
curious about that trip in particular. What was one really
bad moment on that trip.
Speaker 2 (50:34):
I'll go with food poisoning in eastern Siberia that caused
me to hallucinate at a time. I was staying in
a Russian farmhouse up a ladder in a loft, so
I had to while I was hallucinating, climb down to
use the bathroom every few minutes late late one night.
(50:56):
But I will say it was an incredible trip.
Speaker 1 (50:59):
That wait, I want to get to the incredible trip part.
But what was the nature of the hallucination.
Speaker 2 (51:07):
It was like profoundly lifelike dreams, and I recognized at
the time for you know, what they were, and it
was just bizarre to be, you know, on this rural
farm in eastern Siberia hallucinating and trying to climb down
a ladder. So don't you know crap where I'm sleeping?
Speaker 1 (51:27):
Yes, yes, okay, you were going to say how great
the trip was, tell me that part.
Speaker 2 (51:31):
It was just absolutely astonishing to go from Moscow ultimately
all the way to Singapore over a land because we
got to watch out the window of a train moving
into about twenty miles an hour Europe turned into Asia,
and we brought history books along and read them and
it was an incredible education and I'm so glad we
(51:53):
took that trip. It certainly shaped how I see the
world and I'll never forget it.
Speaker 1 (51:58):
And is it right that you have like some super
top secret clearance.
Speaker 2 (52:05):
Well, they haven't told me where the aliens are, so
I don't know how high have a clearance. I actually
have it.
Speaker 1 (52:10):
Across that question off the list. I'm like, I'm curious, what, like,
what do you have to do to get a you know,
a really high level clearance.
Speaker 2 (52:20):
Well you just had to fill out a bunch of
paperwork and and take take a drug test.
Speaker 1 (52:25):
Uh.
Speaker 2 (52:26):
But what I will say is that, you know, holding
a security clearance, you know, is not all fun, right,
because you you learn dings about the world, and you
you see things that you you often can't can't forget.
So although I was really thrilled when I first was
granted a top secret clearance. There are days now that
I wish I never had one.
Speaker 1 (52:47):
Huh, because the world is scarier or that than you
than you would have thought.
Speaker 2 (52:58):
Uh, the world is is scarier and and and more
dangerous and and uh people people sometimes do really really
awful things.
Speaker 1 (53:07):
Yes, anything else you want to talking about, I would.
Speaker 2 (53:11):
I would just say to everybody that's listening that that
now is an incredible time to be watching the world,
because we really are seeing historic things happen almost every day.
And anybody that pick us up a news story about
Ukraine or about China or about the Middle East, it's
sort of like reading the papers. I suppose you know,
(53:33):
in the run up to the First World War the
Second World War, you just see things that are so
striking and that tell you so much about where the
world is going. Uh, that that that it's worth it's
worth paying attention.
Speaker 1 (53:48):
I got nervous when you said run up to the
First World War or Second World War.
Speaker 2 (53:53):
Well, I say that quite quite specifically in the sense
that you know, warfare is changing remarkably fast, and we've
seen a succession of advanced militaries fail, the Russian military,
the Israeli military demonstrably failed during the attacks that Moss
waged on October seventh, and I think it would be
(54:18):
humorous to imagine that our military, the American military, couldn't
fail in a similar way. So that's why I think
it's really important to pay attention to what's happening in
conflict around the world and to realize that we as
Americans now need to pay a lot more attention because
we no longer have the margin of error that we're
(54:38):
accustomed to in being able to project military power.
Speaker 1 (54:48):
Christopher Kierkoff is an advisor at the Defense Innovation Unit.
Today's show was produced by Gabriel Hunter Cheng. It was
edited by Lyddy Jane Kott and engineered by Sarah Brugier.
You can email us at problem at Pushkin dot FM.
I'm Jacob Goldstein and we'll be back next week with
another episode of What's Your Problem? Doctor A sign instituted
(55:12):
the fat FA
Pushkin. If you go to the front line of the
war in Ukraine and you look up, there's a very
good chance you'll see a drone. Could be a friendly drone,
could be an enemy drone, could be a reconnaissance drone,
or it could be a drone that is trying to
(00:36):
kill you. The war in Ukraine is the first war
in history where huge numbers of cheap drones powered largely
by commercial grade hardware and open source software, are playing
a central role. This technological change has profound implications. It
gives smaller countries like Ukraine new ways to fight, and
(00:57):
it means the militaries of big traditional powers military is
built on twentieth century technologies like tanks and aircraft carriers,
need to radically change just to keep up. I'm Jacob Goldstein,
and this is what's your problem. My guest today is
Christopher Kirkoff. Nine years ago, Christopher helped to start the
(01:20):
Defense Innovation Unit, a Defense Department office in Silicon Valley.
He currently works as an advisor there. Christopher says, in
many ways, the US military has failed to keep up
with the way military technology has changed. That fundamentally is
the problem. DIU is trying to solve how can the
giant bureaucracy that is the US military catch up with
(01:42):
the latest military technology. Christopher is a civilian. He had
a bunch of national security related jobs in the Obama administration,
and he recently co wrote a book about his work
at the Defense Innovation Unit, the DIIU. Christopher and I
talk about the book and the DIIU later in the interview,
(02:02):
but to start, we talked about the weapons and tech
being used in the war in Ukraine. So, I mean,
it's in some ways like the war in Ukraine. It
is some version of the war or the kind of
war you've been thinking about for a long time, years
and years.
Speaker 2 (02:21):
Well, I've always looked at Ukraine, you know, at sort
of two levels. The first, of course, is that it's
just a very tragic and frankly needless war. You know,
there's there's very few reasons right ever to go to war,
and this is a particularly stupid war that's just going
to cost a lot of young men and women their lives.
(02:45):
So it's tragic, and I'm terribly sorry for the suffering
of the Ukrainian people, and frankly the suffering of the
young conscripted Russian soldiers as well, So let me just
say that to start. But the second way that I
look at Ukraine as you know, essentially a laboratory of war.
We saw in you know, a decade ago already the
(03:06):
rise of commercial technologies that it was it was obvious
could be weaponized and weaponized at scale. And I mean
I remember sitting on the e ring of the Pentagon
watching YouTube videos of drones, you know, first of all,
quad copters flying around, you know, first sinkly, then in pairs,
then doing dances, and it was really easy to imagine
(03:29):
that at some point in the future those drones could
themselves also be carrying payloads of various kinds. And not
only that, but I mean these are drones that you know,
you could order on Amazon, right, they were a few
hundred dollars, so they were incredibly inexpensive to begin experimenting with.
So all the ingredients were there for a complete revolution
(03:52):
in the tools with which which war could be fought,
and they came together kind of all at once in
a way when Russian armored columns began and advancing in Ukraine. Right.
Speaker 1 (04:08):
I mean, it's it's kind of easy to forget now,
but it at the time when Russia invaded Ukraine, seems
like the basic conventional wisdom was, oh, giant country with
a huge army invading, They're going to win in a week.
And that didn't happen. I mean, what what role did
(04:28):
this sort of new set of technologies play in allowing
Ukraine to defend itself.
Speaker 2 (04:34):
Well, you know that the technologies actually came into play
even before the invasion commenced. And one of the most
visible ways that came into play is I mean, this
is the first war in a way where there's so
many private imagery companies that have their own satellite constellations
that are beaming back to Earth high resolution imagery, resolution
(04:56):
of the order of what would have been, you know,
a Cold War spy satellite just a few years ago. Uh.
And this this importantly, this, these images weren't just going
to you know, the US government or to other militaries.
They were available to anybody that wanted to see them.
And so when Putin and the Kremlin was issuing statements
(05:18):
to the effect that no, they weren't going to invade Ukraine,
in fact, they were demobilizing the Russian military and preparing
to ship material back to Russia. By rail. The Biden
administration was able to release commercial imagery that showed no,
in fact, there's armored columns lining up on the border
(05:38):
ready to go.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
Uh huh. I mean the fact that it was commercial
means you didn't even need the Biden administration, right like
anybody who paid for a subscription could see that the
Russian tanks were there.
Speaker 2 (05:50):
Right exactly, and so and this carried on. Then so
the invasion begins and the Ukrainians not only have eyes
and ears from this commercial data fees, not just imagery,
but also radio frequency intelligence, and that gets paired quickly
(06:11):
with starlink at a moment when you know, the Russians
are using very advanced cyber attacks to attempt to take
down not only the Internet in Ukraine, but also the
command and control structure of the Ukrainian military. And what
then happened next was really quite unique and amazing. The
Ukrainian government had become quite adept at offering digital services
(06:36):
to its citizens, both through online websites and through a
smartphone app that the government built. In fact, Zelensky actually
campaigned as a somebody who would bring in a new
generation of digital services, whether it was taxes or you know,
the ability to incorporate online. So the Ukrainian government very
(06:56):
quickly reconfigure a smartphone app that Ukrainians used every day
in their ordinary lives to allow Ukrainians to be able
to send in spot reports of you know, I just
saw a tank column moving past my town.
Speaker 1 (07:10):
You basically just pull out your phone and open your
app and instead of whatever, calling an uber, you say,
I just saw a tank.
Speaker 2 (07:17):
Well, yeah, so the nickname for this became Uber for artillery.
It literally was possible for citizens to file a spot
report that went right away to a command center in
the Ministry of Defense, and artillery and other weapons were
literally dispatched on that information.
Speaker 1 (07:36):
So, okay, So that's the sort of initial state of play.
And then there's this evolution, right it seems like it's
three years from now, a long time. There has been
this really intense yeah, evolution, innovation right on both sides.
Talk to me about that. How has how has technology
(07:57):
driven this sort of rapid evolution of war fighting over
the last few years.
Speaker 2 (08:02):
Well, Ukraine has been described the Ukrainian military has been described,
you know, as a as a military that already came
with a silicon valley wing attached to it because Ukraine
over the last two decades has redefined itself as a
country of programmers. It has a large endemic IT industry
(08:23):
that was there before the war, and the Ukrainian government
was really smart in that it mobilized, of course, military
age males to serve It really is a citizen army
in that respect, but it took anybody that had engineering
or programming skills and it allowed them either to work
for a private company developing technology or to work for
(08:45):
the military developing technology. And so from the first weeks
of the war you had an incredible number of engineers
spitballing on how to develop indigenous technology that could take
on the Russians. And this mattered because as soon as
the Russians got their advanced electronic warfare systems to the
(09:08):
front and move them forward and turn them on even
advanced Western drones that either Ukraine already had in this
inventory or rushed in and the opening weeks of the
war became essentially ineffective because they were not programmed nor
did they have the sensors on them to be able
to defeat the extremely advanced Russian countermeasures that were immediately
(09:31):
rolled out.
Speaker 1 (09:32):
So the Russians were essentially jamming the drones in some way.
They had some kind of technology that rendered sort of
off the shelf or even military grade drones ineffective.
Speaker 2 (09:43):
The jamming was so powerful that if you were in
Kiev and you say you were on the third or
fourth form of a hotel and you tried to order
an uber your location on the map in the Uber app,
which show up in the middle of the Indian Ocean.
Because the GPS jamming was so effective that even in cities,
(10:04):
it wasn't possible to pick up a reliable signal that
you know, cities that were hundred miles from the front.
So at the front, the electromagnetic spectrum was just flooded
with energy and that caused right away, it touched off
this technology race to invent drones that could essentially fly
(10:28):
on their own, even through incredibly intense jamming. And so
the Ukrainians and it was remarkable to go see when
my co author Radshaw and I got a chance to
visit Ukraine a year and a half ago, we went
to a number of drone companies and they have essentially
the Ukrainians in a matter of months, recreated the entire
(10:51):
American Cold War precision strike complex that we first got
to know so well in the original Gulf War, where
we all of a sudden were dropping bombs down chimneys.
So the Ukrainians have an essence, used a combination of
open source software and low cost hardware to recreate everything
(11:15):
from the function of our a wax planes. These are
the airline looking airplanes with the giant raidardomes on top
that provide a kind of God's eye view of the battlefield.
So they literally have drones whose sole purpose is to
keep track of large parts of the battlefield to other
(11:36):
smaller surveillance drones that will go take pictures of a
specific area that the Ukrainians want to target. They'll relay
that imagery back kind of almost like miniature YouTube spy
planes flying and dropping film canisters and whatnot, and they'll
quickly be able to then load the images of Russian
(11:57):
targets that they want to hit up onto killer drones
that will then use image recognition and terrain following software
to go hunt and find the target. It's with fully
you know autonomy on fully autonomous routes right that don't
require phoning home for them either to navigate or have
(12:18):
permission to engage. On top of that, you actually have
the Ukrainians using open source software to fuse different sensor streams,
so you can have a Ukrainian commander that on a
tablet computer in front of them has data feeds from
surveillance drones that that are relaying video in real time
to maps of the electronic warfare spectrum. You know. So
(12:45):
it's really incredible what they've been able to do for
essentially pennies on the dollar of what the American military
is spent to recreate the same technological stack.
Speaker 1 (12:56):
So you went to Ukraine a year and a half
ago or so. You mentioned a couple of the places
you visited. One of them is sort of a had
been the Ukrainian version of like best Buy right and
had been transfer warmed. Tell me about that.
Speaker 2 (13:11):
Yeah, it was wild running around the city of Kiev
visiting a number of the places that the government had
commandeered for the war effort. And so one of these
places was an all literal you know, Ukraine's version of
Best Buy, a big box store essentially on the wall
were still signed saying you know, televisions, appliances, you know,
(13:34):
there were ads for washing machines, you know, on the walls,
like walking to the Best Buy, but instead of there
being a whole bunch of electronics for you to buy,
there were benches, work benches laid out in an assembly
a line style rows and this particular electronics store was
being used to mass produce quad copter Kamakazi drones. So
(13:55):
at one end of the assembly line you would start
with the frame of the drone and by the time
he got to the other end, you would have a
completely working drone with communications software ready to be mated
with either an anti personnel charge or a shaped charge
to go through armor, you know, a couple of kilogram
(14:16):
charge that would create these inexpensive mass produced quad copters
into quite potent weapons.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
When you say a charge, should I think bomb? It's
basically a little.
Speaker 2 (14:27):
Bomb, right, yeah, larger than a grenade.
Speaker 1 (14:29):
Yeah. And then it would so go out to the
front and they'd put the bomb on it and they'd
go crash it into a Russian tank or something like that.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
They sure would. And this goes back to the incredibly
novel hybrid warfare that we're seeing in Ukraine, where yes,
there are you know, in many respects, the war in
Ukraine is a. There is a lot of continuities with
the First and the Second World War. There are trench lines,
there is artillery, there are tanks and mechanize differenttry that
(15:01):
are moving around. But at the same time in the
trenches are drone pilots and they are launching armed drones
and sense drones that are watching enemy movements behind enemy lines.
And so the battle you know in World War One
or World War Two typically happened at the front where
forces actually came into contact with one another. Today, Joan
(15:25):
Wolfire is pushing the battle behind the front.
Speaker 1 (15:28):
It makes the front sort of more porous exactly.
Speaker 2 (15:31):
So if you were, example, you know, a Russian armor unit,
and you're trying to advance into Ukrainian territory, you have
to bring your tanks and your armored personal carriers with
your infantry towards the front. Well, the Ukrainian has gone
in the habit of using their inexpensive kamikaze drones to
(15:51):
loiter and track armored personal carriers, and at the moment
at which troops would disembark the armored personal carrier to
move towards the front, they would strike. So this you know,
lawn range or sort of short range precisions. Strike has
completely changed how the war is being fought. It's being
fought unlike any other war in modern times.
Speaker 1 (16:14):
So the war has been going on for a few years.
Both Russia and Ukraine have clearly been learning and you know,
developing new technology at this incredibly rapid pace. How does
the war in Ukraine look different now than it did
three years ago or two years ago shortly after it started.
Speaker 2 (16:31):
Yeah, well, we're you know, back to a place that's
a well known place to historians, to military historians, where
you know, there was an initial explosion of conflict in
the in the confused invasion, where massive Russian armored columns
(16:52):
rushed in at multiple points in the country. They were
ultimately beaten back to a certain point. Those lines, you know,
over time came to freeze. Because each side has very
potent precision strike weapons, it's very hard to change those lines.
In other words, the defense in a way has an advantage.
(17:14):
It's very very hard to use offensive mass to gain territory,
which is why we've seen the battle lines not shift
all that much after they settled in the initial months
of the year. But what's going on behind them has
been this incredible combat through cycles of innovation, who can
(17:35):
come up with better electronic countermeasures, who can come up
with the next generation of drones that will defeat them?
And so both the Russians and the Ukrainians have been
innovating behind the front lines and then bringing that technology forward.
Speaker 1 (17:48):
Does the world look different in some way now than
it did a couple of years ago? Or is it
different on such a subtle level, like the gpsgmming is
better and the countermeasures are better, and so the net
effect is the same.
Speaker 2 (18:02):
I say, it's different in pretty dramatic ways. So today
there are such effect of small scale Kamakazi drones that
they can effectively hunt individuals. So we are truly today
in a black Mere episode where if you're a civilian
(18:22):
at a border city near the front, or a soldier
at the front, you are in danger of every time
you leave the bunker or leave your house literally being
pursued by a drone that's trying to kill you.
Speaker 1 (18:37):
I mean, how do you survive a kamakazi drone attack?
Speaker 2 (18:40):
You essentially have to take cover and so oftentimes you
know the sound of a drone buzzing, you know, And
this is a challenge, right because on every square mile
of the front, they're probably a dozen or more drones
in the air at any given time.
Speaker 1 (18:56):
So if you're fighting this where there's basically always a
drone flying over your head and maybe it's coming to
kill you personally, and maybe it's not.
Speaker 2 (19:04):
The airspace on both sides of the lines incredibly overrun
with drones. I mean they are literally smacking it to
each other in the air. It's like flocks of birds
at this point. So so no, the changes we're seeing, frankly,
are not subtle at all. They're quite dramatic.
Speaker 1 (19:22):
So what does the US learn from the war in Ukraine.
Speaker 2 (19:27):
It's woken the United States and our allies up in
two very profound ways. The first is that, you know,
it turns out we had not been stockpiling adequate material
for war, whether it was howards to shells or anti
tank missiles or sophisticated rockets we had basically you know,
(19:48):
ran to the storage cupboard and found it to be
almost bare. And that's very alarming. You know, it happened
because of course munitions, when the budget gets tired, it's
easy to say, oh, we'll buy more next year. So
that's how we ended up in that situation. So we
discovered a crisis actually of military readiness on our side,
and we discovered a manufacturing base more than that that
(20:09):
was not easily able to be mobilized because many factories
that produce these weapons had been idle for years or
even shuttered. And in a world in which supply chains
are threatened globally, if you can't assume the seas are
going to be saved for transit, you have to be
able to manufacture this weaponry within your borders. But there
(20:30):
was an even more profound wake up call, and let's
just go back to the use of Kamakazi drones. We
gave the Ukrainians very early in the war and one
A one Abraham's battle tanks. These are the most sophisticated
battle tank in the world. We've all seen pictures of them.
You can be driving down the highway in an Abram's
(20:50):
battle tank at seventy miles an hour and you can
decide which window of a skyscraper to put around through them.
It's an incredible piece of hardware. And almost all thirty
one of those tanks have been destroyed or disabled by
Russian Kamakazi drones that each cost no more than a
few thousand dollars a piece.
Speaker 1 (21:07):
And what's the tank cost the tankst.
Speaker 2 (21:09):
Oh gosh, I don't know, twelve or fifteen million dollars
or maybe more. So that tells me another military strategist,
that if you're an army who bought a lot of tanks,
and you presume that your military strength comes from those tanks,
you could easily be surprised by an adversary using really
(21:29):
an expensive Kama Coze drones. In other words, the era
of manned mechanized warfare is over. In the same way
that during the First World War, tanks showed us that
the cavalry age was coming to a close, we are
now at the end of the era of the battle tank.
Speaker 1 (21:47):
So you're sayings, tanks now are about as useful as
horses were in nineteen fifteen. Yes, what do we do
about that? What does that mean for the United States?
Speaker 2 (22:04):
Well, the reason why my cousin I wrote a book
all about just how far behind the US military finds
itself is that this phenomena of less expensive technology overcoming
legacy weapons systems, you know, the sort of building blocks
(22:25):
of the Cold War American military isn't true just for tanks,
And in fact we're already seeing this in Ukraine, where
the Russian black sea fleet is today being kept in
port by Ukrainians ingenious use of autonomous boats that are
carrying payloads of high explosives that have rammed in and
(22:50):
sunk the largest Russian ship, the Moskova on the black seat.
So the naval strategists called the Russian fleet now being
a fleet in being, it's a fleet kept in port
because of cheap autonomous technology. So, in other words, many
of the Americans most powerful militaries systems, aircraft carriers, battle tanks,
(23:12):
battleships may now no longer be as effective as they
were just a few years ago.
Speaker 1 (23:19):
I mean so in terms of changing the equilibrium. Is
the effect of essentially autonomous technology drones and then ship
drones to give more power to countries with less money.
Is that one effect?
Speaker 2 (23:33):
Well, there's two effects. So the first and most obvious
effect is that a country with fewer financial resources can
amass larger degrees of military power. But there's a second
and more insidious effect, which is that militaries are inherently
conservative institutions for a couple of reasons. One, war is
(23:55):
a very unforgiving teacher. And it's almost impossible through just
simulations alone to actually replicate combat conditions. And so you
can test, you can test new systems all you want,
but you won't actually have the com evident. So they're
going to work in the way you suspect them to
work or want them to work until you go to war.
So this is what leads militaries to almost always perpetually
(24:18):
be overfocused on winning the last war rather than winning
the war. That's the cop.
Speaker 1 (24:26):
Still to come on the show. Why the US military
is not ready to fight a war right now according
to Chris, and what it might take to change that. So, okay,
there is this problem right the US military is not
(24:48):
really keeping up with technological change. And this is a
problem that Christopher has been working on for a while now.
It's a key part of the reason he was tapped
to help launch the Defense Innovation Unit back in twenty sixteen,
and to kind of set the scene here right to
give a sense of what he and his colleagues were
up against, what they were trying to change when they
launched the Defense Inovation Unit. I asked Christopher about this
(25:11):
story that he and his co author tell in their book,
it's the story of something they saw at the US
military's Combined Air Operations Center in Katar.
Speaker 2 (25:22):
So the Combined Air Operations Center is this nerve center
that is in charge of running all air operations in
the Middle East in an area that's actually larger than
the lower forty eight States. And so any plane, any missile,
any air strike that goes on in this extraordinary piece
(25:45):
of geography is the responsibility of a set of airmen
and women that operate in a base in Qatar. And
in twenty sixteen, you'll remember, there was a crisis in
the Middle East. Isis was storming through countries, was encircling
(26:05):
the Iraqi population in Mosul, was trying to prosecut the
largest genocide of the twenty first century against the Ziti
people who were trapped on Mountain Jar. And these civilians
were kept alive only by an extraordinary campaign of US
air strikes. We were striking ISIS forces every few minutes
(26:28):
twenty four to seven for weeks on end, in a
bombing campaign that's the highest intensity in history. And to
sustain a bombing campaign of this you have to have,
of course fighter aircraft and surveillance, but you also have
to have refueling tankers. These fighter jets are gas guzzlers.
They need to refill their gas tanks every forty minutes
(26:49):
or so, and to do that they have to mate
up with air refueling tankers. And this is actually a
very complex thing to figure out because fighters come in
different types, they refuel at different altitudes, they have different
nozzles on them, and if you have hundreds of aircraft
a day aloft operating in combat support roles, you need
(27:12):
dozens of tankers to refuel them. So how did the
Air Force men and women in uniform and guitar orchestrate
the complex planning of tanker routes. Well, they used a whiteboard.
We showed up in twenty sixteen and found people essentially
(27:34):
operating like we did in World War Two, except instead
of having a chalkboard and magnets, we had a whiteboard.
And they were having to do all these calculations by hand,
which took an enormous number of hours. Why by hand
because the computer program that was supposed to do this
had broken and they were waiting for an upgrade. But
(27:55):
they had been waiting seven years for an upgrade that
one of the large defense companies was in charge of
developing that was way of rebudget and way behind schedule.
Speaker 1 (28:05):
They'd been waiting seven years for an upgrade, and they
were in the middle of this like multi multi million
dollar command center the US had built, coordinating hundreds of
flights all the time.
Speaker 2 (28:16):
It gets worse. So the minute that there's a deviation
from the plan, whether that's bad weather or you know,
unexpected combat operations in a different area than you'd plan
for now you have to redo the calculations on the fly.
So this is actually introducing a lot of unneeded risk
in our combat operations that that only puts it risk
(28:38):
the men and women of the US military, but also
puts it risk the forces on the ground that we're
trying to protect, where the civilians were trying to defend.
Speaker 1 (28:46):
You describe like somewhere in the process, there'd be like
somebody with one spreadsheet and then there was another spreadsheet,
but like the two spreadsheets couldn't like talk to each other, right,
so somebody had to read out the numbers to get
it from one spreadsheet to the other. You describe extra
refueling flights all the time because they couldn't, you know,
(29:07):
process the data fast enough essentially by hand.
Speaker 2 (29:10):
There, they had multiple different databases they had to manually
fuel fuse together. Somebody would literally stand behind the computer
operator to make sure they were typing in the numbers right,
and it would take fifty person hours to put together
the refueling plan for the next day. So we realized
this was an opportunity to show what Silicon Valley does best,
(29:32):
which is rapid iteration using software to create an optimization
algorithm that could solve this in seconds.
Speaker 1 (29:39):
Why hadn't they just fixed it? Let me ask the
naive question, like, it's not as a technical matter, it's
not a hard problem. What was the actual problem.
Speaker 2 (29:47):
So the problem is that the way the military bias
technology and the way Silicon Valley makes it, it's like
Mars and Venus, they're on two different planets. So the
military way, it's called a requirements based system of developing technology.
So a bunch of people sit in a windowless room
and they imagine, if I were to need a piece
(30:10):
of technology to help with air refueling, what should it
look like. And they write a bunch of specifications down
that they think would be great. So it's drawn up
in the abstract and then because contracting takes a lot
in the military. Oftentimes multiple generations of technology come along
before that system ever gets built, but of course it
has to be built through the original specifications.
Speaker 1 (30:32):
So the thing you get is basically a thing somebody
designed ten years ago or more, which is so obviously
a bad idea, right, And I mean certainly you make
a compelling case in the book that it's obviously a
bad idea. Is there any counter argument? Is there any
case for the way they do it?
Speaker 2 (30:52):
There is, And we have to be very sympathetic to
the people that are a part of the system because
the system actually was built to do something a little
bit different, and that is, you know, there aren't too
many companies that can build a nuclear powered aircraft carrier
or a submarine or a fifth generation stuff fighter, and
so you can't exactly go on Amazon and comparison price
(31:13):
shop if the're you're the US govern.
Speaker 1 (31:15):
There is no market. There is no market for a
nuclear sub in a conventional sense. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (31:20):
So the Defense Procurement system and the associated auditing system
that governs it is designed to save taxpayer dollar by
coming up with exceptionally precise specifications through which things must
be built and then a cost accounting system that is
meant to make sure that the taxpayer is never overcharged
(31:42):
from the one or two companies that can supply this technology.
So it was built for a different era, and in
terms of building aircraft carriers it actually does a reasonable job.
But commercial technology, there is a market. You don't have
to do it that way, and in fact, doing it
that way only slows you down.
Speaker 1 (32:00):
So okay, so you go, you see this terrible, inefficient, dangerous,
expensive technology failure that is happening at this base and cutter,
what do you do?
Speaker 2 (32:16):
Phone home? So my Cothur Raj got on the phone
that night and we immediately fedexed Imax and deployed a
few Air Force courders and a few coders from the
Silicon Valley out with the Pivotal to Qatar to sit
side by side with the airmen and women doing the
(32:39):
tanker planning and to build an automated app that they
could use eventually to push a button and have this done.
And it took just over a million dollars and just
over one hundred days to do it.
Speaker 1 (32:55):
And you said it saved a million dollars in excess
flights in like a couple of days.
Speaker 2 (33:00):
Right, So before the Air Force had to actually keep
a couple refueling tankers on standby to scramble because because
they weren't able to pivot the plan fast enough. And
of course, each time you scramble an enormous seven sixty
seven sized aircraft full of kerosene, it's energetically expensive. So
the tool that we use to optimize air tanker refueling
(33:24):
actually has saved the Air Force today something like I
think twenty four million gallons of kerosene a year. So
we're talking, you know, a lot of money of savings, right,
So this is this is a no brainer. Spend the money,
automate it. You get better mission outcomes for lower cost.
It's the Silicon Valley way of co developing technology with
the users, of iterating on a minimum, minimum viral product
(33:47):
and then adding features to that product as you go along.
Speaker 1 (33:51):
So this is like an early win in a fairly
straightforward way. I mean also worth noting that having the
coders go sit with the people who are using the
thing is like classic Silicon Valley, right, get close to
the user, see what they need, as opposed to like
have a guy in Washington ten years ago drop a
(34:11):
list of things he thinks people are going to need
ten years from now. Right, there are a couple of
new companies selling weapons and technology to the government that
seem worth talking about, that seem quite different than the
sort of twentieth century giant military contractors, Right, Pallanteer and Anderil.
(34:32):
Tell me about those two companies and how they fit
with this broader story.
Speaker 2 (34:36):
Well, it's important to recognize that the defense contracts we
have today, particularly the large ones that we know about,
the household names so Lockheed, Martin, Boeing, and so on
and so forth, they are really best thought of kind
of like utility companies, as highly regulated enterprises that are
(34:57):
not like traditional product companies because they have to adhere
to this massive system of cost accounting and auditing, this
two thousand page re regulation that governs everything they do.
And so in fact, the Pentagon has created these companies
and the way they operate, which is extraordinarily inefficient in
(35:19):
terms of how modern technology is produced by the commercial sector.
So what's so interesting about companies like Anderole, like Palanteer,
like shield Ai. They are traditional product companies in the
sense that Google and Microsoft are. They are unburdened by
having to erect this massive, separate accounting system to deal
(35:41):
with the Department of Defense bureaucracy because they are primarily
selling their technology through a completely different kind of contract
that we pioneered at DIU that our twenty nine year
old employee, Lauren Daily, came up with by seeing up
late at night and reading congressional legalation.
Speaker 1 (35:59):
Basically a way that the Department of Defense can buy
weapons without going through the traditional two thousand page process.
Speaker 2 (36:06):
Exactly.
Speaker 1 (36:07):
It's so amazing that that's what's driving the technological change
right in a way, not surprising but quite interesting, right
that this, this the process ends up driving the outcome
in a backwards way.
Speaker 2 (36:23):
Well, political scientists and sociologists all, you know, are always
keen to look at what you know, structures are operating,
and there is of course a whole discipline looks at
public institutions, which are constrained quite a bit more than
public companies. So once it isn't surprised. But what is
a surprise is the difference that one individual made in this.
So Lauren Daly, you know, the daughter of a tank driver,
(36:46):
somebody who entered the army as an acquisition specialist. As
her way of serving the country, figures out that there's
a loophole a Congress that a renegae Senate staffer is
just inserted in the National Defense Authorization Act that that
DAU can drive a truck through, and in a matter
of weeks, through some hustling at the Pentagon and the
(37:07):
support of thatsh, Carter codified this new method of procuring
technology called the Commercial Solutions Offering that essentially all want
us to negotiate with companies for a few weeks very openly,
in a very conversational way on commercial terms, so the
way they were used to negotiating and then to sign
a contract. So this was a game changer. And I
(37:27):
am so proud to report that since twenty sixteen to date,
about eighty billion dollars of technology acquisition by the departed
Defense has gone through this new mechanism. And in fact,
last week Trump Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth signed out
a memo mandating that all software bought by the Department
of Defense be acquired using this means, not the old
(37:51):
two thousand page, two thousand pageway.
Speaker 1 (37:55):
Huh So it's sort of the end of the old
pretty clearly bad way of buying software for the military.
Speaker 2 (38:04):
Yes, And so you know, there's two things to keep
in mind here. You know, one, it doesn't make sense
to use a two thousand page rule book to buy
things where you don't need it, where there's an actual market.
But the second thing that's really important. We would never
go to Microsoft or Amazon and ask them to build
an aircraft carrier. So why were we going to Raytheon
(38:26):
or Lockheed Martin and asking them or north remmen to
build software. It's not their core expertise. So the Pentagon,
in the last eight years, thanks in part to its
Silicon Valley office, has gotten a lot smarter about how
to procure advanced technology. And so fast forward to today.
The most exciting contract the Air Force is letting to
(38:47):
build up to potentially ten thousand supersonic autonomous drones that
will fight alongside our fifth generation man fighters. That contract
went to anderall In General Atomics, not de Boeing, not
to Lockheed, not to one of the prime So we're
seeing this complete sea change in who is being successful
(39:09):
at pulling down the biggest contracts with the most advanced
technology come out of the Department today.
Speaker 1 (39:16):
So do you think the US is ready to fight
a war right now, No, go on.
Speaker 2 (39:31):
We are in the unfortunate position of having made major
decatal investments in weapons systems that have essentially reached the
end of their lifespan.
Speaker 1 (39:48):
You mean like tank and aircraft carrier. Yes, not a
particular tank or aircraft carrier, but just any tank or
aircraft carrier is now basically obsolete.
Speaker 2 (39:58):
And we have a three part challenge. We're not yet
exactly sure because we haven't experimented enough what technology to
buy to replace them. We're also not sure exactly how
to use that new technology and what the military calls
concepts of operation. So when we invented care aviation, that's
(40:20):
a whole new way of using aircraft to fight naval.
Speaker 1 (40:25):
Battles, you have to figure out what to do with
ten thousand supersonic drones.
Speaker 2 (40:30):
And the third problem we have is that once we
do figure out what technology to buy and what operating
concepts to insert them into, we have to scale that up.
Speaker 1 (40:41):
Is there not a fourth problem, which was we're still
spending billions and billions of dollars on weapons that you're
arguing aren't going to work, are obsolete.
Speaker 2 (40:51):
Yes, that is a fourth problem. The Biden administration shifted
less than one percent of the Department of Defense's procurement
budget towards autonomous.
Speaker 1 (41:01):
Weapons less than one percent, meaning basically.
Speaker 2 (41:03):
Zero, basically zero.
Speaker 1 (41:06):
Yes, I feel like that's a bigger problem than the
other three. And I mean that comes through in the
book in a way, right, like your antagonist in the book,
in a narrative sense, is not Russia or China or
isis right. It's bureaucrats. It's it's you know, you go
to Capitol Hill and somebody's like, we're going to take
(41:27):
your money away because you're not spending any money in Indiana,
and that's where my congressman is from. And it seems
like that is still a problem.
Speaker 2 (41:37):
It is, And you know, this is one of these
moments where the strategic environment is changing so fast and
anybody watching or reading the news knows it from what's
happening in Ukraine, what's happening in the Middleize, what's happening elsewhere.
And so we're in this situation where the ordinary way
we buy technology and manage the military won't work. If
(41:58):
we keep doing it, we're going to walk the plank.
So we're now in a fierce battle to outmaneuver our
own system to transform it before there's another common.
Speaker 1 (42:10):
Frankly, it's hard for me to imagine the kind of
change you're suggesting is needed. Like when I think of
how whatever Congress works, and how the country works, and
how the military works and how everything works, it's hard
for him to imagine. I mean, unless there was a war,
which I don't want to happen obviously, right, Like, I
don't know, what do you think is going to happen?
Speaker 2 (42:31):
Well, you know, to make a more optimistic case, there
are a lot of things that are now going in
our favor. Most fundamentally, there is a new consensus in
the Pentagon and in the Congress that we're in a
crisis and the way to solve it is to pivot
the way the Department of Defense buys technology and use
this technology. And at the same time, there's a new
(42:53):
commitment in industry. We have a very dynamic economy the
United States of America, with venture backed investment creating small
scale infusions of technology that scales up companies in incredible ways.
So since Defense Innovation Unit figure it out this more
seamless way to quickly buy technology and actually make the
(43:13):
government a good customer. In Silicon Valley, there's been about
two hundred and fifty billion dollars of venture funds now
in play to back defense tech startups like and Andro
Al's am on the most successful, but there are hundreds more.
So the market is already responding. And today there is
more dynamic invention going on in the defense tech sector
(43:36):
than I think anywhere else. And so if the consensus
in the Pentagon in Congress can actually be changed into
shifts in the budget, we will quickly beheaded in the
right direction.
Speaker 1 (43:51):
I was with you until you said, if consensus in
the Pentagon in Congress can be changed, right, that's like
there's so much money there and so much inertia, and
like the government seems quite bad in many domains at
changing when change is needed. That it seems I don't know,
(44:15):
you think that might happen. It seems unlikely to me.
Speaker 2 (44:18):
Well, you know, again to paint the optimist picture.
Speaker 1 (44:24):
Well, just for a sec what do you think? What
do you think is going to happen?
Speaker 2 (44:28):
I am worried that people now understand the problem, but
the pendulum of change is going to swing too slowly. Huh.
Speaker 1 (44:38):
So I read that you recently did a residence at Anthropic,
which is one of the big frontier AI companies that
may claude the large language model, And so I'm curious.
This is very interesting to me, Like what did you
learn there? Like, what do you know now that you
didn't know before you you were there?
Speaker 2 (45:01):
The United States is unquestionably right now ahead at least
by a little bit in artificial intelligence. So's it's a
technology that we're better at than anybody else. And so
I think that the sort of sixty four million dollar
question in terms of military strategy for the United States
is whether or not we can harness AI in designing
(45:22):
a new military because right now that is the one
thing that will give us an unquestioned advantage in the battlefield.
Speaker 1 (45:30):
I mean, more generally, how do you think about AI
in the future of war? I mean, what does it
mean for the equilibrium? And what does it mean for
the sort of relative abilities of big countries and small
countries and kind of you know, rogue actors, Like how
does it change the power dynamics?
Speaker 2 (45:51):
Well, I'm really glad you used the word equilibrium because
it's a it's a core concept in strategy. There's a
whole literature on something called strategic stability, and it's a
literature that comes out in part of the Cold War.
It's a literature that has to reckon with the counterintuitive
(46:13):
finding that the proliferation of nuclear weapons otherds, the more
countries that became nuclear powers, the less incidents of conflict
between them there were, so nuclear weapons, an incredibly dangerous technology,
in a strange way, actually made the world safer.
Speaker 1 (46:30):
So far, so far.
Speaker 2 (46:32):
Now, with this whole true, if everybody had a nuclear weapon,
probably not.
Speaker 1 (46:36):
Right, And there's also a tail risk where it's like,
maybe this was just the lucky whatever eighty years, but
go on, yeah, so far, so far.
Speaker 2 (46:45):
So I think that the question is what will AI
do to strategic stability? Will it actually enhance it in
the following sense of AI is clearly going to make
warfare much more destructive than it is today, and more
destructive systems will raise the cost of going to war.
(47:07):
And so if multiple countries have really advanced AI, even
if one country is a little bit ahead of the other,
that won't change the fact that either one going to
war starting a war will be massively costly. So it
could be that AI, as a very diffuse technology, actually
increases to deterrence, in effect creating a higher bar to
(47:32):
starting a war. The optimistic scenario, the truly optimistic scenario,
is that not only does AI the diffusion of AI
technology make great power war less likely, but because there
are going to be some bad actors that get a
hold of this stuff and go cause a RUCKUS, that's
actually going to increase the interest of nations like the
(47:55):
US and China working together to ensure they retain their
own sovereignty and moopolying the means of violence to keep
their citizens safe. So it could actually not only decrease
the likelihood of great power of war, it could increase
international cop ration because we desperately need it if we're
all going to stay safe. Now. There is, of course,
a darker alternative. One flavor of that darker alternative is
(48:18):
that there is a country that believes they have a
breakout uh uh you know AI, and that that changes
for them the calculus of wanting to go to war
because they think that they'll just be able to eke
out enough advantage that that they'll launch an attack. Also,
I mean there's another danger too. We have to remember that,
you know, Vietnam started because in part the US Navy
(48:43):
thought its destroyers were attacked in the Gulf of Talking,
leading the you know US Congress to pass the Golf
of Tonkin Resolutions, which later led to the deployment of
troops in Vietnam. Well, turns out the attack never happened.
It was just mass confusion. Uh, And so AI introduces
a lot more uncertainty into the battlefield. That that is
a risk, that is that is worth knowing. And then
(49:05):
truly dark scenario is that AI allows small grop groups
to project lethality in a way that's very hard to control.
Speaker 1 (49:13):
What do you what do you mean when you say that?
Speaker 2 (49:15):
What means that you could go by or make a
weapon for low cost that there is no that there
is no effective defense for, so that you could go
toe to toe, you know, with with the most advanced
police force or homeland security force in military and still
cause a bunch of damage. So that is indeed a
very legitimate worry. It always has been. AI would just
(49:37):
be the latest technological innovation to land in the hands
of bad actors that are looking to do bad things.
Speaker 1 (49:48):
We'll be back in a minute with the lightning round. Okay,
let's finish with the lightning round, which is going to
be a little lighter. It's going to be like then
(50:11):
the rest of this conversation. I read in a bio
of yours online that you have backpacked in over thirty countries,
including a trek from Moscow to Singapore overland, and I'm
curious about that trip in particular. What was one really
bad moment on that trip.
Speaker 2 (50:34):
I'll go with food poisoning in eastern Siberia that caused
me to hallucinate at a time. I was staying in
a Russian farmhouse up a ladder in a loft, so
I had to while I was hallucinating, climb down to
use the bathroom every few minutes late late one night.
(50:56):
But I will say it was an incredible trip.
Speaker 1 (50:59):
That wait, I want to get to the incredible trip part.
But what was the nature of the hallucination.
Speaker 2 (51:07):
It was like profoundly lifelike dreams, and I recognized at
the time for you know, what they were, and it
was just bizarre to be, you know, on this rural
farm in eastern Siberia hallucinating and trying to climb down
a ladder. So don't you know crap where I'm sleeping?
Speaker 1 (51:27):
Yes, yes, okay, you were going to say how great
the trip was, tell me that part.
Speaker 2 (51:31):
It was just absolutely astonishing to go from Moscow ultimately
all the way to Singapore over a land because we
got to watch out the window of a train moving
into about twenty miles an hour Europe turned into Asia,
and we brought history books along and read them and
it was an incredible education and I'm so glad we
(51:53):
took that trip. It certainly shaped how I see the
world and I'll never forget it.
Speaker 1 (51:58):
And is it right that you have like some super
top secret clearance.
Speaker 2 (52:05):
Well, they haven't told me where the aliens are, so
I don't know how high have a clearance. I actually
have it.
Speaker 1 (52:10):
Across that question off the list. I'm like, I'm curious, what, like,
what do you have to do to get a you know,
a really high level clearance.
Speaker 2 (52:20):
Well you just had to fill out a bunch of
paperwork and and take take a drug test.
Speaker 1 (52:25):
Uh.
Speaker 2 (52:26):
But what I will say is that, you know, holding
a security clearance, you know, is not all fun, right,
because you you learn dings about the world, and you
you see things that you you often can't can't forget.
So although I was really thrilled when I first was
granted a top secret clearance. There are days now that
I wish I never had one.
Speaker 1 (52:47):
Huh, because the world is scarier or that than you
than you would have thought.
Speaker 2 (52:58):
Uh, the world is is scarier and and and more
dangerous and and uh people people sometimes do really really
awful things.
Speaker 1 (53:07):
Yes, anything else you want to talking about, I would.
Speaker 2 (53:11):
I would just say to everybody that's listening that that
now is an incredible time to be watching the world,
because we really are seeing historic things happen almost every day.
And anybody that pick us up a news story about
Ukraine or about China or about the Middle East, it's
sort of like reading the papers. I suppose you know,
(53:33):
in the run up to the First World War the
Second World War, you just see things that are so
striking and that tell you so much about where the
world is going. Uh, that that that it's worth it's
worth paying attention.
Speaker 1 (53:48):
I got nervous when you said run up to the
First World War or Second World War.
Speaker 2 (53:53):
Well, I say that quite quite specifically in the sense
that you know, warfare is changing remarkably fast, and we've
seen a succession of advanced militaries fail, the Russian military,
the Israeli military demonstrably failed during the attacks that Moss
waged on October seventh, and I think it would be
(54:18):
humorous to imagine that our military, the American military, couldn't
fail in a similar way. So that's why I think
it's really important to pay attention to what's happening in
conflict around the world and to realize that we as
Americans now need to pay a lot more attention because
we no longer have the margin of error that we're
(54:38):
accustomed to in being able to project military power.
Speaker 1 (54:48):
Christopher Kierkoff is an advisor at the Defense Innovation Unit.
Today's show was produced by Gabriel Hunter Cheng. It was
edited by Lyddy Jane Kott and engineered by Sarah Brugier.
You can email us at problem at Pushkin dot FM.
I'm Jacob Goldstein and we'll be back next week with
another episode of What's Your Problem? Doctor A sign instituted
(55:12):
the fat FA
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