Unit X: The Future of War in Silicon Valley

Future Wars: The Nexus of Technology and the Military | Council on Foreign Relations

Panelists discuss the Silicon Valley’s role in the future of war and whether or not the Pentagon is successfully innovating rapidly enough to keep up with the technological changes facing the military.

Copies of Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley Are Transforming the Future of War will be available for purchase. ROBBINS: Great turnout for considering how hot it is out there. Thank you all for coming. And, Anne, thank you for doing this. It’s probably even more hellish in D.C. So welcome to the— NEUBERGER: Exactly. ROBBINS: Yes, exactly. (Laughs.) Yes, exactly. Exactly how bad is it there? (Laughs.) So welcome to today’s Council on Foreign Relations meeting on Future Wars: The Nexus of Technology and the Military. I’m Carla Anne Robbins. I’m a senior fellow here and cohost of The World Next Week podcast for the Council. You all know our speakers. You have their bios, so I’m just going to give you a few highlights. To my right, Christopher Kirchhoff is a founding partner of the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit X, tasked with bringing innovative commercial technology to warfighting. Is that a good summary of it? KIRCHHOFF: Sure. ROBBINS: OK. KIRCHHOFF: I’ll take it. ROBBINS: During the Obama administration, he was also director for strategic planning at the National Security Council and the senior staff civilian aide to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He is the coauthor of the new book, Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley Are Transforming the Future of War. Speaking to us from Washington, D.C., Anne Neuberger is deputy national security advisor for cyber and emerging technology. Previously, she served as the National Security Agency’s director of cybersecurity. She also led NSA’s election security effort and served as assistant deputy director of the Operations Directorate. And Raj Shah here is managing partner and cofounder of Shield Capital, and previously ran DIUx. He serves as a reserve F-16 pilot in the U.S. Air Force and has completed multiple combat deployments. And he is the coauthor of Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley Are Transforming the Future of War. So now we’ve gotten two plugs for your book. (Laughter.) OK. Anne, Raj, Chris and I will chat for about thirty minutes, and then we’ll turn questions from our members. And as a reminder, this meeting is on the record. So, Raj, can we start with you? SHAH: Absolutely. Thank you, Carla. ROBBINS: Great. So in the fall of 2021, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Mark Milley described China’s surprise testing of a hypersonic missile as “very close” to a Sputnik moment. And we all know that a Sputnik moment suggests that the U.S. was not only caught off guard but was also seriously lagging behind a technological and military rival. Are we lagging behind the Chinese that much in military technology? SHAH: Carla, thanks for—thanks for the CFR for having us here and for moderating. You know, there’s been a lot of discussion and consternation around the rise of China, their intentions, and our military capability. And certainly, there are some specific technology areas—hypersonics, things that can kill carriers, that they have some advantages on. But maybe we step back and think about, you know, what are the—what are the more strategic or broad categories that China is competing against us in a national security fashion? So one is just, like, mass. Like, how much are they investing? How many ships? How many airplanes? And their significant growth in their capability. And, of course, they only have to defend or think about it regionally. But the other one, that I think is particularly relevant to the work that Chris and I did, is their concept of civil-military fusion. How are they integrating with their commercial sector and using that or having that prepositioned for national security? So, for example, the world’s largest manufacturer of small quadcopters is called DJI. And they are the best ones in the world. They make more. They probably have 90-95 percent of the consumer market. And they can snap them out, you know, by the—by the millions. There is no such thing as a true break between the private sector and the CCP, right? The CCP has representatives in the company and on the board. And so in a time of conflict, you could see them saying, all the next drones that come out will be going to the PLA, they will have facial recognition and, you know, munitions attached to them. And we don’t have that equivalent here in the U.S., for good reason. And maybe we can talk later about, you know, what I think our response should be. But you think about that in AI, you think about that in cyber, you think about that and all these other emerging technologies, they have an influence in the commercial sector that we don’t. And that could be a source of that imbalance. ROBBINS: So that’s part of their strength, but how much do we have to worry about how far ahead are they? And particular areas do you think we should be most concerned about? I mean, Sputnik moment’s a pretty strong, scary idea. SHAH: It’s a strong statement. You know, and, as I say, we shouldn’t let a good crisis go to waste. So, you know, how can we then use that to increase energy in our innovation sector to make the right investments and to counter that. Particularly, again, if you think about if, God forbid, we had to have a conflict in the Pacific, it’s a really long way from Japan and Korea to China. And those open waters with, you know, large ships, like aircraft carriers, are fairly vulnerable. ROBBINS: So, Chris, the war in Ukraine has been another major learning moment about technology in modern warfare. You’ve written about how at the start of the war the Russians were the ones weighed down by obsolete 20th-century technology, but it now seems they’re adapting at a chillingly fast rate and with very low-cost technology. And particularly how Russian drones have forced the Ukrainians to pull back our very advanced tanks. Can you tal