Christopher Kirchhoff: observation

Transcript context

…Now, the title of your book, again, is Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley Are Transforming the Future of War. Just tell us, what’s Unit X? Unit X is Defense Innovation Unit experimental. It was started in 2015, the year that Ash Carter became secretary of defense. It was started off an insight that Ash Carter had when he was just Professor Ash Carter in 2001, when he wrote an article, “Keeping the Edge,” that was quite prescient about strategic trends. He noted at the end of the Cold War that federal research and development was essentially flatlining at the exact moment that the technology economy was taking off on a rocket-like trajectory, straight up. By the time he arrived into office — and he forecast this in his 2001 article — the market capitalization of all the major tech companies — Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon — were each themselves individually bigger than the entire defense industry combined. What does that tell you? That tells you that the locus of innovation has shifted away from military labs, away from DARPA, which used to be generations ahead in technology, to the commercial technology ecosystem. The problem is that the entire defense procurement system and the Pentagon’s line of vision are tuned in to the military R&D labs and to the defense primes. But if they’re no longer the ones coming up with the leading-edge technology, the Pentagon is not structured to become, in Ash’s words, “a fast follower of the commercial market.” Defense Innovation Unit, the Pentagon’s first-ever Silicon Valley office, started by Ash, the first secretary of defense to visit Silicon Valley in over 20 years, was an attempt to pivot the entire US military to be able to more quickly adopt commercial technology, which was clearly starting to outpace the technology being built by the defense primes. Just to clarify, your role in all of this has been . . . ?…

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