“We win by doubling down on what has provided America’s strength: free flow of capital and free flow of talent.” —Raj Shah
“We’re at an amazing juncture and I think all of us should keep one eye peeled to the budget scale and see how many decimals we can get things to move.” —Christopher Kirchoff
Raj Shah and Christopher Kirchoff joined First Breakfast’s Madeline Zimmerman and Zac Dannelly for a discussion about their new book, Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley are Transforming the Future of War.
Unit X tells the story of standing up the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) back in 2016. This is a topic which could not be more relevant as the nation focuses on the continued challenges, but increasing importance, of the rapid adoption of commercial technology to maintain a technological edge.
Highlights of the conversation include:
Time is the most critical variable: Our conception of deploying new technology is stuck in the Cold War era, where cycle times were months and years. The Ukraine War and then the Hamas and Hezbollah attacks made it brutally clear that technology refresh and the implementation of the OODA loop now happen in hours and days. Software is a warfighting skill in and of itself.
The Department of Defense’s budget is misallocated for experimental spend: For example, the Replicator initiative is a fraction of a percent of the DoD budget. What would it look like if the DoD were instead spending 5% or 10% on new approaches and technologies?
The battlefield is continuous from the tip of the spear all the way through maintenance of the supply chain and to the back office: Every component is ripe for innovation; it’s not just weapons and the kill chain. First Breakfast enables diverse companies to go after the full diversity of mission sets by lowering the barrier to entry to provide software.
A whole of nation defense is a human capital problem: There are dozens of existing authorities to creatively and uniquely bring industry talent to the government to solve hard problems. We need to lean into these authorities to properly leverage expertise in the commercial sector.
