AI transcript
0:00:08 Something unexpected happened after Jeremy Scott confessed to killing Michelle Schofield in Bone Valley Season 1.
0:00:13 Every time I hear about my dad, it’s, oh, he’s a killer. He’s just straight evil.
0:00:17 I was becoming the bridge between Jeremy Scott and the son he’d never known.
0:00:20 At the end of the day, I’m literally a son of a killer.
0:00:29 Listen to new episodes of Bone Valley Season 2 starting April 9th on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
0:00:49 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.
0:00:55 It could be a friendly drone. It could be an enemy drone. It could be a reconnaissance drone.
0:00:58 Or it could be a drone that is trying to kill you.
0:01:10 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.
0:01:14 This technological change has profound implications.
0:01:17 It gives smaller countries, like Ukraine, new ways to fight.
0:01:29 And it means the militaries of big traditional powers, militaries built on 20th-century technologies like tanks and aircraft carriers, need to radically change just to keep up.
0:01:37 I’m Jacob Goldstein, and this is What’s Your Problem?
0:01:39 My guest today is Christopher Kirchhoff.
0:01:46 Nine years ago, Christopher helped to start the Defense Innovation Unit, a Defense Department office in Silicon Valley.
0:01:48 He currently works as an advisor there.
0:01:55 Christopher says, in many ways, the U.S. military has failed to keep up with the way military technology has changed.
0:01:58 That, fundamentally, is the problem DIU is trying to solve.
0:02:05 How can the giant bureaucracy that is the U.S. military catch up with the latest military technology?
0:02:09 Christopher is a civilian.
0:02:13 He had a bunch of national security-related jobs in the Obama administration.
0:02:19 And he recently co-wrote a book about his work at the Defense Innovation Unit, the DIU.
0:02:23 Christopher and I talk about the book and the DIU later in the interview.
0:02:28 But to start, we talked about the weapons and tech being used in the war in Ukraine.
0:02:42 So, I mean, it seems in some ways like the war in Ukraine is some version of the war or the kind of war you’ve been thinking about for a long time, years and years.
0:02:47 Well, I’ve always looked at Ukraine, you know, at sort of two levels.
0:02:52 The first, of course, is that it’s just a very tragic and, frankly, needless war.
0:03:00 You know, there’s very few reasons, right, ever to go to war.
0:03:05 And this is a particularly stupid war that’s just going to cost a lot of young men and women their lives.
0:03:07 So, it’s tragic.
0:03:13 And I’m terribly sorry for the suffering of the Ukrainian people and, frankly, the suffering of the young conscripted Russian soldiers as well.
0:03:15 So, let me just say that to start.
0:03:34 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 rise of commercial technologies that it was obvious could be weaponized and weaponized at scale.
0:03:47 And, I mean, I remember sitting on the e-ring in the Pentagon watching YouTube videos of drones, you know, first of all, quadcopters flying around, you know, first singly, then in pairs, then doing dances.
0:03:56 And it was really easy to imagine that at some point in the future, those drones could themselves also be carrying payloads of various kinds.
0:04:01 And not only that, but, I mean, these are drones that, you know, you could order on Amazon, right?
0:04:07 They were a few hundred dollars, so they were incredibly inexpensive to begin experimenting with.
0:04:18 So, all the ingredients were there for a complete revolution in the tools with which war could be fought.
0:04:28 And they came together kind of all at once in a way when Russian armored columns began advancing in Ukraine.
0:04:39 Right. I mean, it’s kind of easy to forget now, but at the time when Russia invaded Ukraine, it seems like the basic conventional wisdom was,
0:04:45 oh, giant country with a huge army invading, they’re going to win in a week.
0:04:46 And that didn’t happen.
0:04:55 I mean, what role did this sort of new set of technologies play in allowing Ukraine to defend itself?
0:05:02 Well, you know, the technologies actually came into play even before the invasion commenced.
0:05:08 And one of the most visible ways that came into play is, I mean, this is the first war in a way
0:05:16 where there’s so many private imagery companies that have their own satellite constellations that are beaming back to Earth,
0:05:23 high-resolution imagery, resolution of the order of what would have been, you know, a Cold War spy satellite just a few years ago.
0:05:31 And this, importantly, these images weren’t just going to, you know, the U.S. government or to other militaries.
0:05:34 They were available to anybody that wanted to see them.
0:05:42 And so when Putin and the Kremlin was issuing statements to the effect that, no, they weren’t going to invade Ukraine,
0:05:49 in fact, they were demobilizing the Russian military and preparing to ship material back to Russia by rail,
0:05:56 the Biden administration was able to release commercial imagery that showed, you know, no.
0:06:01 In fact, there’s armored columns lining up on the border, ready to go.
0:06:06 I mean, the fact that it was commercial means you didn’t even need the Biden administration, right?
0:06:12 Like anybody who paid for a subscription could see that the Russian tanks were there, right?
0:06:13 Exactly.
0:06:16 And so, and this carried on then.
0:06:18 So the invasion, you know, begins.
0:06:30 And the Ukrainians not only have eyes and ears from this commercial data feeds, not just imagery, but also radio frequency intelligence.
0:06:39 And that gets paired quickly with Starlink at a moment when, you know, the Russians are using very advanced cyber attacks
0:06:46 to attempt to take down not only the internet in Ukraine, but also the command and control structure of the Ukrainian military.
0:06:50 And what, what then happened next was really quite unique and amazing.
0:07:03 The Ukrainian government had become quite adept at offering digital services to its citizens, both, both through online websites and through a smartphone app that the government built.
0:07:15 In fact, Zelensky actually campaigned as somebody who would bring in a new generation of digital services, whether it was taxes or, you know, the ability to incorporate online.
0:07:31 So, so the Ukrainian government very quickly reconfigured a smartphone app that Ukrainians used every day in their ordinary lives to, to allow Ukrainians to be able to send in spot reports of, you know, I just saw a tank column moving past my town.
0:07:34 So you basically just pull out your phone and open your app.
0:07:38 And instead of whatever, calling an Uber, you say, I just saw a tank.
0:07:39 Well, yeah.
0:07:42 So the nickname for this became Uber for artillery.
0:07:57 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.
0:07:58 So, okay.
0:08:02 So that’s the sort of initial state of play.
0:08:05 And then there is this evolution, right?
0:08:07 It seems like it’s three years now, a long time.
0:08:15 There has been this really intense, yeah, evolution, innovation, right, on both sides.
0:08:16 Talk to me about that.
0:08:22 How has technology driven this sort of rapid evolution of warfighting over the last few years?
0:08:34 Well, Ukraine has been described, the Ukrainian military has been described, you know, as a military that already came with a Silicon Valley wing attached to it.
0:08:41 Because Ukraine, you know, over the last two decades has redefined itself as a country of programmers.
0:08:46 It has a large endemic IT industry that was, you know, there before the war.
0:08:54 And the Ukrainian government was really smart in that it mobilized, of course, military-age males to serve.
0:08:56 It really is a citizen army in that respect.
0:09:08 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 the military developing technology.
0:09:23 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.
0:09:42 And this mattered because as soon as the Russians got their advanced electronic warfare systems to the front and move them forward and turn them on, even advanced Western drones that either Ukraine already had in its inventory or were rushed in in the opening weeks of the war became essentially ineffective.
0:09:53 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 rolled out.
0:09:56 So the Russians were essentially jamming the drones in some way.
0:10:04 They had some kind of technology that rendered sort of off-the-shelf or even military-grade drones ineffective.
0:10:31 The jamming was so powerful that if you were in Kiev and, you know, say you were on the third or fourth floor of a hotel and you tried to order an Uber, your location on the map in the Uber app would show up in the middle of the Indian Ocean because the GPS jamming was so effective that even in cities, it wasn’t possible to pick up a reliable signal that, you know, cities that were 100 miles from the front.
0:10:38 So at the front, the electromagnetic spectrum was just flooded with energy.
0:10:53 And that caused right away, it touched off this technology race to invent drones that could essentially fly on their own, even through incredibly intense jamming.
0:11:03 And so the Ukrainians, and it was remarkable to go see when my co-author Rajshan and I got a chance to visit Ukraine a year and a half ago.
0:11:25 We went to a number of drone companies and they have essentially, the Ukrainians, in a matter of months, recreated the entire 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, you know, dropping bombs down chimneys.
0:11:40 So the Ukrainians have, in essence, used a combination of open source software and low-cost hardware to recreate everything from the function of our AWACS planes.
0:11:49 These are the airline-looking airplanes with the giant radar drones on top that provide a kind of God’s eye view of the battlefield.
0:11:55 So they literally have drones whose sole purpose is to keep track of large parts of the battlefield.
0:12:06 To other smaller surveillance drones that will go take pictures of a specific area that the Ukrainians want to target.
0:12:14 They’ll relay that imagery back, kind of almost like miniature U-2 spy planes flying and, you know, dropping film canisters and whatnot.
0:12:35 And they’ll quickly be able to then load the images of Russian 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 targets with fully, you know, on fully autonomous routes, right?
0:12:41 That don’t require phoning home for them either to navigate or have permission to engage.
0:12:47 On top of that, you actually have the Ukrainians using open source software to fuse different sensor streams.
0:13:05 So you can have a Ukrainian commander that on a tablet computer in front of them has data feeds from surveillance drones that are relaying video in real time to maps of the electronic warfare spectrum.
0:13:17 You know, it’s really incredible what they’ve been able to do for essentially pennies on the dollar of what the American military has spent to recreate the same technological stack.
0:13:21 So you went to Ukraine a year and a half ago or so.
0:13:24 You mentioned a couple of the places you visited.
0:13:29 One of them is sort of a, had been a Ukrainian version of like Best Buy, right?
0:13:30 And it had been transformed.
0:13:31 Tell me about that.
0:13:43 Yeah, it was wild running around the city of Kyiv, visiting a number of the places that the government had commandeered for the war effort.
0:13:49 And so one of these places was an old literal, you know, Ukraine’s version of Best Buy, a big box store essentially.
0:13:58 And on the wall were still signs saying, you know, televisions, appliances, you know, there were ads for washing machines, you know, on the wall.
0:14:07 It was like walking to a Best Buy, but instead of there being a whole bunch of electronics for you to buy, there were benches, workbenches laid out in assembly line style rows.
0:14:15 And this particular electronics store was being used to mass produce quadcopter kamikaze drones.
0:14:22 So at one end of the assembly line, you would start with the frame of the drone.
0:14:43 And by the time you got to the other end, you would have a completely working drone with communication software ready to be mated with either an anti-personnel charge or a shaped charge to go through armor, you know, a couple kilogram charge that would create these inexpensive mass-produced quadcopters into quite potent weapons.
0:14:47 When you say a charge, should I think bomb?
0:14:49 It’s basically a little bomb, right?
0:14:50 Yeah, larger than a grenade.
0:14:51 Yeah.
0:15:00 And then it would, so it would 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?
0:15:01 They sure would.
0:15:17 And this goes back to the incredibly novel hybrid warfare that we see 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.
0:15:24 There are, there are trench lines, there is artillery, there is artillery, there are tanks and mechanized infantry that are moving around.
0:15:35 But at the same time, in the trenches are drone pilots and they are launching armed drones and reconnaissance drones that are watching enemy movements behind enemy lines.
0:15:45 And so the battle, you know, in World War I or World War II typically happened at the front where forces actually came into contact with one another.
0:15:49 Today, drone warfare is pushing the battle behind the front.
0:15:51 It makes the front sort of more porous.
0:15:52 Exactly.
0:16:06 So if you’re, for example, you know, a Russian army unit and you’re trying to advance into Ukrainian territory, you have to bring your tanks and your armored personnel carriers with your infantry towards the front.
0:16:15 Well, the Ukrainians got in the habit of using their inexpensive kamikaze drones to loiter and track armored personnel carriers.
0:16:21 And at the moment at which troops would disembark the armored personnel carrier to move towards the front, they would strike.
0:16:22 Uh-huh.
0:16:32 So this, you know, long-range or sort of short-range precision strike has completely changed how the war is being fought.
0:16:35 It’s being fought unlike any other war in modern times.
0:16:37 So the war has been going on for a few years.
0:16:44 Both Russia and Ukraine have clearly been learning and, you know, developing new technology at this incredibly rapid pace.
0:16:51 How does the war in Ukraine look different now than it did three years ago or two years ago, shortly after it started?
0:17:15 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 confused invasion where massive Russian armored columns rushed in at multiple points in the country.
0:17:18 They were ultimately beaten back to a certain point.
0:17:22 Those lines, you know, over time came to freeze.
0:17:31 Because each side has very potent precision strike weapons, it’s very hard to change those lines.
0:17:34 In other words, the defense, in a way, has an advantage.
0:17:47 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.
0:17:56 But what’s going on behind them has been this incredible combat through cycles of innovation.
0:18:02 who can come up with better electronic countermeasures, who can come up with the next generation of drones that will defeat them.
0:18:09 And so both the Russians and the Ukrainians have been innovating behind the front lines and then bringing that technology forward.
0:18:22 So does the war look different in some way now than it did a couple years ago, or is it different on such a subtle level, like the GPS jamming is better and the countermeasures are better, and so the net effect is the same?
0:18:37 So today, there are such effective small scale kamikaze drones that they can effectively hunt individuals.
0:18:58 So we are truly today in a Black Mirror episode where if you’re a civilian 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.
0:19:01 I mean, how do you survive a kamikaze drone attack?
0:19:03 You essentially have to take cover.
0:19:11 And so oftentimes, you know, the sound of a drone buzzing, you know, and this is the challenge, right?
0:19:17 Because on every square mile of the front, there are probably a dozen or more drones in the air at any given time.
0:19:22 So if you’re fighting this war, there’s basically always a drone flying over your head.
0:19:26 And maybe it’s coming to kill you personally, and maybe it’s not.
0:19:32 The airspace on both sides of the line is incredibly overrun with drones.
0:19:35 I mean, they are literally smacking into each other in the air.
0:19:38 It’s like flocks of birds at this point.
0:19:42 So, no, the changes we’re seeing, frankly, are not subtle at all.
0:19:43 They’re quite dramatic.
0:19:47 So what has the U.S. learned from the war in Ukraine?
0:19:53 It’s woken the United States and our allies up in two very profound ways.
0:20:06 The first is that, you know, it turns out we had not been stockpiling adequate material for war, whether it was howards or shells or anti-tank missiles or sophisticated rockets.
0:20:13 We had basically, you know, ran to the storage cupboard and found it to be almost bare.
0:20:15 And that’s very alarming.
0:20:20 You know, it happened because, of course, munitions, when the budget gets tight, it’s easy to say, oh, we’ll buy more next year.
0:20:22 So that’s how we ended up in that situation.
0:20:27 So we discovered a crisis, actually, of military readiness on our side.
0:20:38 And we discovered a manufacturing base, more than that, that was not easily able to be mobilized because many factories that produce these weapons have been idle for years or even shuttered.
0:20:50 And in a world in which supply chains are threatened globally, if you can’t assume the seas are going to be safe for transit, you have to be able to manufacture this weaponry within your borders.
0:20:53 But there was an even more profound wake-up call.
0:20:56 And let’s just go back to the use of kamikaze drones.
0:21:02 We gave the Ukrainians very early in the war 31 M1A1 Abrams battle tanks.
0:21:05 These are the most sophisticated battle tank in the world.
0:21:08 We’ve all, you know, seen pictures of them.
0:21:16 You can be driving down the highway in an Abrams, you know, battle tank at 70 miles an hour, and you can decide which window of a skyscraper to put around through.
0:21:18 I mean, it’s an incredible piece of hardware.
0:21:27 And almost all 31 of those tanks have been destroyed or disabled by Russian kamikaze drones that each cost no more than a few thousand dollars a piece.
0:21:29 And what’s the tank cost?
0:21:33 The tank cost, oh gosh, I don’t know, 12 or 15 million dollars or maybe more.
0:21:47 So that tells me and other military strategists that if you’re an army who bought a lot of tanks and you presume that your military strength comes from those tanks,
0:21:52 you could easily be surprised by an adversary using really inexpensive kamikaze drones.
0:21:58 In other words, the era of manned mechanized warfare is over.
0:22:04 In the same way that during the First World War, tanks showed us that the Calvary Age was coming to a close.
0:22:08 We are now at the end of the era of the battle tank.
0:22:14 So you’re saying tanks now are about as useful as horses were in 1915?
0:22:15 Yes.
0:22:21 What do we do about that?
0:22:24 What does that mean for the United States?
0:22:50 Well, the reason why, like Arthur and I, you know, wrote Unit X, a book all about just how far behind the U.S. military finds itself is that this phenomena of less expensive technology overcoming legacy weapon systems, you know, the sort of building blocks of the Cold War, American military, isn’t true just for tanks.
0:23:15 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 sunk the largest Russian ship, the Moskova, on the Black Sea.
0:23:21 So the, you know, naval strategists call the Russian fleet now being a fleet in being.
0:23:25 It’s a fleet kept in port because of cheap autonomous technology.
0:23:40 So in other words, many of the Americans’ most powerful military systems, aircraft carriers, battle tanks, battleships, may now no longer be as effective as they were just a few years ago.
0:23:52 I mean, so in terms of, like, changing the equilibrium, is the effect of essentially autonomous technology drones and then ship drones to give more power to countries with less money?
0:23:54 I mean, is that one effect?
0:23:56 Well, there’s two effects.
0:24:06 So the first and most obvious effect is that a country with fewer financial resources can amass larger degrees of military power.
0:24:15 But there’s a second and more insidious effect, which is that militaries are inherently conservative institutions for a couple reasons.
0:24:25 One, war is a very unforgiving teacher, and it’s almost impossible through just simulations alone to actually replicate combat conditions.
0:24:34 And so you can test new systems all you want, but you won’t actually have the confidence that they’re going to work in the way you expect them to work or want them to work until you go to war.
0:24:44 So this is what leads militaries to almost always perpetually be over-focused on winning the last war rather than winning the war that’s to come.
0:24:55 Still to come on the show, why the U.S. military is not ready to fight a war right now, according to Chris, and what it might take to change that.
0:25:12 Something unexpected happened after Jeremy Scott confessed to killing Michelle Schofield in Bone Valley Season 1.
0:25:14 I just knew him as a kid.
0:25:18 Long, silent voices from his past came forward.
0:25:20 And he was just staring at me.
0:25:23 And they had secrets of their own to share.
0:25:30 Um, Gilbert King. I’m the son of Jeremy Lynn Scott.
0:25:34 I was no longer just telling the story. I was part of it.
0:25:38 Every time I hear about my dad, it’s, oh, he’s a killer. He’s just straight evil.
0:25:43 I was becoming the bridge between a killer and the son he’d never known.
0:25:48 If the cops and everything would have done their job properly, my dad would have been in jail. I would have never existed.
0:25:51 I never expected to find myself in this place.
0:25:55 Now, I need to tell you how I got here.
0:25:58 At the end of the day, I’m literally a son of a killer.
0:26:00 Bone Valley Season 2.
0:26:02 Jeremy.
0:26:04 Jeremy, I want to tell you something.
0:26:13 Listen to new episodes of Bone Valley Season 2 starting April 9th on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
0:26:21 And to hear the entire new season ad-free with exclusive content starting April 9th, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts.
0:26:26 So, okay, there is this problem, right?
0:26:30 The U.S. military is not really keeping up with technological change.
0:26:34 And this is a problem that Christopher has been working on for a while now.
0:26:40 It’s a key part of the reason he was tapped to help launch the Defense Innovation Unit back in 2016.
0:26:49 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 Innovation Unit,
0:26:54 I asked Christopher about this story that he and his co-author tell in their book.
0:27:13 So, the combined air operations center is this nerve center that is in charge of running all air operations in the Middle East,
0:27:17 in an area that’s actually larger than the lower 48 states.
0:27:26 And so, any plane, any missile, any airstrike that goes on in this extraordinary piece of geography
0:27:33 is the responsibility of a set of airmen and women that operate in a base in Qatar.
0:27:40 And in 2016, you’ll remember there was a crisis in the Middle East.
0:27:47 ISIS was storming through countries, was encircling the Iraqi population,
0:27:55 in Mosul, was trying to prosecute the largest genocide of the 21st century against the Yazidi people who were trapped on Mount Sinjar.
0:28:02 And these civilians were kept alive only by an extraordinary campaign of U.S. airstrikes.
0:28:11 We were striking ISIS forces every few minutes, 24-7, for weeks on end,
0:28:15 in a bombing campaign that’s the highest intensity in history.
0:28:21 And to sustain a bombing campaign of this, you have to have, of course, fighter aircraft and surveillance,
0:28:23 but you also have to have refueling tankers.
0:28:26 These fighter jets are gas guzzlers.
0:28:30 They need to refill their gas tanks every 40 minutes or so.
0:28:35 And to do that, they have to mate up with air refueling tankers.
0:28:41 And this is actually a very complex thing to figure out because fighters come in different types.
0:28:42 They refuel at different altitudes.
0:28:44 They have different nozzles on them.
0:28:50 And if you have hundreds of aircraft a day aloft operating in combat support roles,
0:28:53 you need dozens of tankers to refuel them.
0:29:05 So how did the Air Force men and women in uniform and guitar orchestrate the complex planning of tanker routes?
0:29:07 Well, they used a whiteboard.
0:29:16 We showed up in 2016 and found people essentially operating like we did in World War II,
0:29:22 except instead of having a chalkboard and magnets, we had a whiteboard.
0:29:28 And they were having to do all these calculations by hand, which took an enormous number of hours.
0:29:29 Why by hand?
0:29:35 Because the computer program that was supposed to do this had broken and they were waiting for an upgrade.
0:29:42 But they had been waiting seven years for an upgrade that one of the large defense companies was in charge of developing
0:29:44 that was way over budget and way behind schedule.
0:29:46 They’d been waiting seven years for an upgrade.
0:29:52 And they were in the middle of this like multi-multi-million dollar command center the U.S. had built,
0:29:56 coordinating hundreds of flights all the time.
0:29:57 It gets worse.
0:30:04 So the minute that there is a deviation from the plan, whether that’s bad weather or, you know,
0:30:08 unexpected combat operations in a different area than you planned for,
0:30:10 now you have to redo the calculations on the fly.
0:30:17 So this is actually introducing a lot of unneeded risk in our combat operations that not only puts at risk
0:30:24 the men and women of the U.S. military, but also puts at risk the forces on the ground that we’re trying to protect
0:30:26 or the civilians we’re trying to defend.
0:30:33 You describe like somewhere in the process, there’d be like somebody with one spreadsheet and then there was another spreadsheet.
0:30:36 But like the two spreadsheets couldn’t like talk to each other.
0:30:36 Right.
0:30:40 So somebody had to read out the numbers to get it from one spreadsheet to the other.
0:30:47 You describe extra refueling flights all the time because they couldn’t, you know,
0:30:50 process the data fast enough essentially by hand.
0:30:55 They had multiple different databases they had to manually fuse together.
0:31:00 Somebody would literally stand behind the computer operator to make sure they were typing in the numbers right.
0:31:06 And it would take 50 person hours to put together the refueling plan for the next day.
0:31:13 So we realized this was an opportunity to show what Silicon Valley does best, which is rapid iteration,
0:31:18 you know, using software to create an optimization algorithm that could solve this in seconds.
0:31:21 Why hadn’t they just fixed it?
0:31:22 Let me ask the naive question.
0:31:26 Like it’s not, as a technical matter, it’s not a hard problem.
0:31:27 What was the actual problem?
0:31:34 So the problem is that the way the military buys technology and the way Silicon Valley makes it,
0:31:37 you know, it’s like, it’s like Mars and Venus.
0:31:39 They’re on two different planets.
0:31:44 So the military way, it’s called a requirements-based system of developing technology.
0:31:51 So a bunch of people sit in a windowless room and they imagine if I were to need a piece of technology
0:31:53 to help with their refueling, what should it look like?
0:31:58 And they write a bunch of specifications down that they think would be great.
0:31:59 So it’s drawn up in the abstract.
0:32:05 And then because contracting takes a lot in the military, oftentimes multiple generations
0:32:09 of technology come along before that system ever gets built.
0:32:12 But of course, it has to be built to the original specifications.
0:32:17 So the thing you get is basically a thing somebody designed 10 years ago.
0:32:18 Or more.
0:32:22 Which is so obviously a bad idea, right?
0:32:27 And I mean, certainly you make a compelling case in the book that it’s obviously a bad
0:32:27 idea.
0:32:29 Is there any counter argument?
0:32:32 Is there any case for the way they do it?
0:32:33 There is.
0:32:37 And we have to be very sympathetic to the people that are a part of the system because the system
0:32:40 actually was built to do something a little bit different.
0:32:46 And that is, you know, there aren’t too many companies that can build a nuclear-powered aircraft
0:32:49 carrier or a submarine or a fifth-generation stealth fighter.
0:32:55 And so you can’t exactly go on Amazon and comparison price shop if you’re the U.S.
0:32:55 government.
0:32:56 There is no market.
0:32:57 There is no market.
0:33:00 There is no market for a nuclear sub in a conventional sense.
0:33:00 Yeah.
0:33:07 So the defense procurement system and the associated auditing system that governs it is designed
0:33:16 to save taxpayer dollar by coming up with exceptionally precise specifications through which things must
0:33:16 be built.
0:33:22 And then a cost accounting system that is meant to make sure that the taxpayer is never overcharged
0:33:25 from the one or two companies that can supply this technology.
0:33:27 So it was built for a different era.
0:33:32 And in terms of building aircraft carriers, it actually does a reasonable job.
0:33:35 But commercial technology, you know, there is a market.
0:33:36 You don’t have to do it that way.
0:33:39 And in fact, doing it that way only slows you down.
0:33:49 So, okay, so you go, you see this terrible, inefficient, dangerous, expensive technology failure that is
0:33:53 happening at this base in Qatar.
0:33:53 What do you do?
0:33:57 We, uh, uh, uh, phone home.
0:34:20 So, uh, my co-author Raj, uh, got on the phone that night and, uh, we immediately, uh, uh, FedExed, uh, IMAX and deployed, uh, a few Air Force coders and a few coders from the Silicon Valley outfit pivotal to Qatar to sit side by side with, uh, the, the airmen and women doing the tanker planning.
0:34:27 And to build an automated app that they could use eventually to push a button and have this done.
0:34:32 And it took just over a million dollars and just over a hundred days to do it.
0:34:41 Um, and you said it saved a million dollars in excess flights in like a couple of days, right?
0:34:52 So before the, the Air Force had to actually keep a couple refueling tankers on standby to scramble because they weren’t able to pivot the plan fast enough.
0:34:59 And of course, each time you scramble an enormous 767 size aircraft full of kerosene, um, it’s energetically expensive.
0:35:11 So the tool that we use to optimize air tanker refueling actually has saved the Air Force today, uh, something like I think 24 million gallons of kerosene a year.
0:35:13 So we’re talking, you know, a lot of money of savings, right?
0:35:15 So this is, this is a no brainer.
0:35:16 Spend the money, automate it.
0:35:20 You get better mission outcomes, uh, for, for lower costs.
0:35:30 It’s the Silicon Valley way of, of co-developing technology with the users of iterating on a minimum, minimum viable, uh, product and then adding features to that product as you go along.
0:35:36 So this is like an early win, uh, in a fairly straightforward way.
0:35:44 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?
0:35:54 Get close to the user, see what they need, as opposed to like have a guy in Washington 10 years ago, drop a list of things he thinks people are going to need 10 years from now, right?
0:36:02 Uh, there are a couple of new companies selling weapons and technology to the government that seem worth talking about.
0:36:09 That seem quite different than the sort of 20th century giant, uh, military contractors, right?
0:36:15 Palantir and Anduril, uh, tell like, tell me about those two companies and how they fit with this broader story.
0:36:24 Well, it’s important to, to recognize that, uh, the defense contracts we have today, particularly the large ones that we know about the household names.
0:36:27 So Lockheed Martin, uh, Boeing, and so on and so forth.
0:36:40 They are really best thought of, um, kind of like utility companies as highly regulated, uh, enterprises that, that, that, that are not like traditional product companies.
0:36:51 Because they have to adhere to this, this massive system of cost accounting and auditing, um, this, you know, 2000, uh, page, you know, regulation that governs everything they do.
0:37:02 And so, in fact, the Pentagon has created these companies, um, and, and the way they operate, which is extraordinarily inefficient in terms of how modern technology is produced by the commercial sector.
0:37:13 So what’s so interesting about companies like Anduril, uh, like Palantir, like Shield AI, they are, uh, traditional product companies in the sense that Google and Microsoft are.
0:37:39 They are unburdened by, um, um, having to erect this massive separate accounting system to deal 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 29-year-old employee, Lauren Daly, came up with, uh, by staying up late at night and, and reading congressional legislation.
0:37:46 Basically a way that the Department of Defense can buy weapons without going through the traditional 2000-page process.
0:37:47 Exactly.
0:37:52 It’s so amazing that that’s what’s driving the technological change, right?
0:37:55 In a way, not surprising, but quite interesting, right?
0:38:02 That this, this, the process ends up driving the outcome, you know, in a backwards way.
0:38:09 Well, political scientists and sociologists all, you know, are always keen to look at what’s, you know, structures are operating.
0:38:15 And, and there is, of course, a whole discipline that looks at public institutions, which are constrained quite a bit more than public companies.
0:38:22 So in one sense, it isn’t a surprise, but what is a surprise is, is the difference that one individual made in this.
0:38:42 So Lauren Daly, you know, the, the daughter of a tank driver, uh, somebody who entered, uh, the army as an acquisition specialist, that’s her way of serving the country, uh, figures out that there’s a loophole, like Congress, that a renegade Senate staffer is just inserted in the National Defense Authorization Act that, that DIU can drive a truck through.
0:39:01 And in a matter of weeks, uh, through some hustling at the Pentagon and the support of Ash Carter, we codified this new method of procuring technology called the commercial solutions offering that essentially allowed us to negotiate with companies for a few weeks, very openly in a very conversational way on commercial terms.
0:39:05 So the way they were used to negotiating, so the way they were used to negotiating and then to sign a contract.
0:39:06 So this was a game changer.
0:39:17 And I am so proud to report that since 2016 to date, about $80 billion of technology acquisition by the Department of Defense has gone through this new mechanism.
0:39:29 And in fact, last week, uh, Trump Secretary of Defense, Pete Hexeth signed out a memo mandating that all software bought by the Department of Defense be acquired using this means,
0:39:34 not the old 2,000 page, uh, 2,000 page way.
0:39:35 Huh.
0:39:43 So it’s sort of the end of the old, pretty clearly bad way of buying software for the military.
0:39:44 Yes.
0:39:47 And, and so, you know, there’s two things to keep in mind here.
0:39:56 You know, one, um, it doesn’t make sense to use a 2,000 page rule book, uh, to buy things where you don’t need it, where there’s, where there’s an actual market.
0:40:03 But the second thing that’s really important, you know, we would never go to Microsoft or Amazon and ask them to build an aircraft carrier.
0:40:09 So why were we going to Raytheon or Lockheed Martin and asking them or Northrop Grumman to build software?
0:40:11 It’s not their core expertise.
0:40:21 So the, the Pentagon in the last, uh, eight years, thanks in part to its Silicon Valley office has gotten a lot smarter about how to procure advanced technology.
0:40:35 And so fast forward to today, uh, the most exciting contract, uh, the air force is letting to build, uh, up to potentially 10,000 supersonic autonomous drones that will fight alongside our fifth generation man fighters.
0:40:44 That, that, that contract, uh, went to, uh, Anderall and General Atomics, not to Boeing, not to Lockheed, not to one of the prime.
0:40:54 So we’re seeing this complete sea change in who, uh, is being successful at, at pulling down the, the biggest contracts with the, with the most advanced technology come out of the department today.
0:41:06 Do you think the U.S. is ready to fight a war right now?
0:41:07 No.
0:41:09 Go on.
0:41:27 We are in the unfortunate position of having made major decadal investments in weapon systems, uh, that have essentially reached the end of their lifespan.
0:41:30 You mean like tanks and aircraft carriers?
0:41:31 Yes.
0:41:38 Just not, not a particular tank or aircraft carrier, but just any tank or aircraft carrier is now basically obsolete.
0:41:42 And, and, and we have a, uh, a three-part challenge.
0:41:50 We’re not yet exactly sure because we haven’t experimented enough what technology to buy to replace them.
0:41:57 We’re also not sure exactly how to use that new technology and what the military calls concepts of operation.
0:42:05 So when we invented carrier aviation, that’s a whole new way of using aircraft to fight naval battles.
0:42:06 Right.
0:42:10 You have to figure out what to do with 10,000 supersonic drones.
0:42:21 And the third problem we have is that, uh, once we do figure out what technology to buy and what operating concepts to insert them into, we have to scale that up.
0:42:29 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?
0:42:32 Uh, yes, that is the fourth problem.
0:42:41 Um, the Biden administration shifted less than 1% of the Department of Defense’s procurement budget towards, um, autonomous weapons.
0:42:44 Less than 1% meaning basically zero.
0:42:45 Basically zero.
0:42:46 Yes.
0:42:52 So I feel like that’s a bigger problem than the other three.
0:42:54 And I mean, that comes through in the book in a way, right?
0:43:02 Like, your antagonist in the book, in a narrative sense, is not Russia or China or ISIS, right?
0:43:03 It’s bureaucrats.
0:43:10 It’s, it’s, you know, you go to Capitol Hill and somebody’s like, we’re going to take your money away because you’re not spending any money in Indiana.
0:43:12 And that’s where my congressman is from.
0:43:15 Um, and it seems like that is still a problem.
0:43:17 It is.
0:43:30 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 Middle East, what’s happening elsewhere.
0:43:38 And, and so we’re in this situation where the ordinary way we buy technology and manage the military won’t work.
0:43:40 If we keep doing it, we’re going to walk the plank.
0:43:49 So we’re now in a, in a fierce battle to outmaneuver our own system, to transform it, uh, before there’s another conflict.
0:43:56 Frankly, it’s hard for me to imagine the kind of change you’re suggesting is needed.
0:44:04 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 me to imagine.
0:44:08 I mean, unless there was a war, which I don’t want to happen, obviously, right?
0:44:09 Like, I don’t know.
0:44:10 What do you, what do you think is going to happen?
0:44:17 Well, you know, to make a more optimistic case, there are a lot of things that are now going in our favor.
0:44:30 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 uses technology.
0:44:35 And at the same time, there’s a new commitment in industry.
0:44:46 We have a very dynamic economy, United States of America, with venture-backed investment, uh, creating small-scale infusions of technology that, that scales up companies in incredible ways.
0:45:04 So, since Defense Innovation Unit figured out this more, uh, seamless way to quickly buy technology and actually make the government a good customer in Silicon Valley, there’s been about $250 billion of venture funds now in play to back defense tech startups like Anderall.
0:45:07 Anderall is among the most successful, but there are hundreds more.
0:45:18 So, the market is already responding, and today there is more dynamic invention going on in the defense tech sector than I think anywhere else.
0:45:31 And, and so if the consensus in the Pentagon and Congress can actually be changed into, uh, you know, shifts in the budget, uh, we will quickly, uh, be, be headed in the right direction.
0:45:36 I was with you until you said if consensus in the Pentagon and Congress can be changed, right?
0:45:41 Like, that’s, like, that’s, like, there’s so much money there and so much inertia.
0:45:55 And, like, the government seems quite bad in many domains at changing when change is needed that it seems, I don’t know, you think that might happen?
0:45:57 It seems unlikely to me.
0:46:04 Well, um, you know, again, to, to paint the optimist picture, um.
0:46:06 Well, just for a sec, like, what do you think?
0:46:07 What do you think is going to happen?
0:46:17 I am worried that people now understand the problem, but the pendulum of change is going to swing too slowly.
0:46:18 Uh-huh.
0:46:27 So, um, I read that you recently did a residence at Anthropic, which is, uh, one of the big frontier AI companies.
0:46:29 It’s a large language model.
0:46:29 It’s a large language model.
0:46:35 And so I’m curious, this is very interesting to me, like, what did you learn there?
0:46:40 Like, what do you know now that you didn’t know before you, you, uh, were there?
0:46:47 The United States is unquestionably right now ahead, uh, at least by a little bit in artificial intelligence.
0:46:51 So it’s, it’s a technology that we’re better at than anybody else.
0:47:08 And so I think that the, the sort of $64 million question in terms of military strategy for United States is whether or not we can harness AI in, uh, designing a new military, uh, because right now that is the one thing that, that will give us an unquestioned advantage on the battlefield.
0:47:14 I mean, more generally, how do you think about AI in the future of war?
0:47:18 I mean, what does it mean for, for the equilibrium?
0:47:27 And what does it mean for the sort of relative abilities of big countries and small countries and kind of, you know, rogue actors?
0:47:30 Like, how, how does it change the power dynamics?
0:47:40 Well, I’m really glad you use the word equilibrium because it’s a, it’s a core concept, uh, in, in strategy.
0:47:48 Uh, there’s a whole literature on something called strategic stability, and it’s a literature that comes out in part of the cold war.
0:47:59 It’s a, it’s a literature that, that has to reckon with the counterintuitive finding that the proliferation of nuclear weapons, in other words, the more countries that became nuclear powers,
0:48:03 the less incidents of conflict between them there were.
0:48:10 So nuclear weapons and incredibly dangerous technology in a strange way actually made the world safer.
0:48:11 So far.
0:48:12 So far.
0:48:14 Now, would this hold true if everybody had a nuclear weapon?
0:48:16 Probably not.
0:48:16 Right.
0:48:22 And there’s also a, a tail risk where it’s like, maybe this was just the lucky, whatever, 80 years.
0:48:23 But go on.
0:48:25 Yeah, so far, so far.
0:48:32 So I think that the, the question is what will AI do to strategic stability?
0:48:32 Yeah.
0:48:42 Will it actually, uh, enhance it in the following sense of AI is clearly going to make warfare much more destructive than it is today.
0:48:47 And, and, and more destructive systems will raise the cost of going to war.
0:49:01 And so if, 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 or starting a war will be massively costly.
0:49:13 So it could be that AI as a very diffuse technology, um, actually increases deterrence in effect, uh, creating a higher bar to starting a war.
0:49:31 The optimistic scenario, uh, the truly optimistic scenario is that not only does AI, the diffusion of AI technology make great power war less likely, but, uh, because there are going to be some bad actors that get ahold of this stuff and, uh, go cause a ruckus.
0:49:43 That’s actually going to increase the interest of nations like the U S and China working together to ensure they retain their own sovereignty and not playing the means of violence to keep their citizens safe.
0:49:50 So it could actually not only decrease the likelihood of great power war, it could increase international cooperation because we desperately need it.
0:49:52 If we’re all going to stay safe.
0:50:07 Now there is, of course, a darker alternative, um, one flavor of that darker alternative is that there is a country that believes they have a breakout, uh, uh, uh, you know, AI and that it, that changes for them.
0:50:15 The calculus of, 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.
0:50:17 Also, I mean, there’s no other danger too.
0:50:33 We have to remember that, you know, Vietnam started because, uh, in part, uh, the U S Navy thought its destroyers were attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin, leading the, you know, U S Congress to pass the Gulf of Tonkin resolutions, which later led to, uh, the deployment of troops in Vietnam.
0:50:35 Well, it turns out the attack never happened.
0:50:37 It was just mass confusion.
0:50:44 Uh, and so AI introduces a lot more uncertainty into the battlefield that, that is a risk that is, that is worth knowing.
0:50:53 And then a truly dark scenario is that, uh, AI allows small groups, um, to project lethality in a way that’s very hard to control.
0:50:55 What do you, what do you mean when you say that?
0:51:12 Well, it means that you could go buy 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, uh, with the most advanced police force or Homeland Security force or military and still cause a bunch of damage.
0:51:15 So that is indeed a very legitimate worry.
0:51:24 It always has been AI would just be the latest technological innovation to land in the hands of bad actors that are looking to do bad things.
0:51:30 We’ll be back in a minute with the lightning round.
0:51:47 Something unexpected happened after Jeremy Scott confessed to killing Michelle Schofield in Bone Valley season one.
0:51:49 I just knew him as a kid.
0:51:54 Long, silent voices from his past came forward.
0:51:56 And he was just staring at me.
0:51:58 And they had secrets of their own to share.
0:52:01 Um, Gilbert King.
0:52:05 I’m the son of Jeremy Lynn Scott.
0:52:08 I was no longer just telling the story.
0:52:09 I was part of it.
0:52:12 Every time I hear about my dad is, oh, he’s a killer.
0:52:14 He’s just straight evil.
0:52:18 I was becoming the bridge between a killer and the son he’d never known.
0:52:22 If the cops and everything would have done their job properly, my dad would have been in jail.
0:52:23 I would have never existed.
0:52:27 I never expected to find myself in this place.
0:52:31 Now, I need to tell you how I got here.
0:52:33 At the end of the day, I’m literally a son of a killer.
0:52:36 Bone Valley, season two.
0:52:37 Jeremy.
0:52:39 Jeremy, I want to tell you something.
0:52:48 Listen to new episodes of Bone Valley, season two, starting April 9th on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
0:52:57 And to hear the entire new season ad-free with exclusive content starting April 9th, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts.
0:53:00 Okay.
0:53:06 Um, let’s finish with the lightning round, which is going to be a little, uh, lighter.
0:53:10 It’s going to be lighter, um, than the rest of this conversation.
0:53:21 Um, I read in a bio of yours online that you have backpacked in over 30 countries, including a trek from Moscow to Singapore over land.
0:53:26 Um, and I’m curious about, about that trip in particular.
0:53:30 Um, what was one really bad moment on that trip?
0:53:45 I’ll go with, uh, 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.
0:53:55 So I had to, while I was hallucinating, climb down, um, to, uh, use the bathroom every few minutes, um, uh, late, late one night.
0:53:58 But I will say it was an incredible trip that night.
0:54:03 I want to get to the incredible trip part, but what was the nature of the hallucination?
0:54:08 Uh, I, I, it was like profoundly lifelike dreams.
0:54:09 Uh-huh.
0:54:25 And I recognized at the time for, you know, what they were, uh, and it was just bizarre to be, you know, on this rural farm in eastern Siberia, hallucinating, trying to climb down a ladder, uh, so I don’t, you know, crap where I’m sleeping.
0:54:26 Yes, yes.
0:54:29 Uh, okay, you were going to say how great the trip was.
0:54:30 Tell me that part.
0:54:43 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 at about 20 miles an hour, Europe turn into Asia.
0:54:47 And we brought history books along and read them.
0:54:50 And it was an incredible education.
0:54:52 And, uh, I’m so glad we took that trip.
0:54:54 Uh, it certainly shaped how I see the world.
0:54:56 And, uh, I’ll never forget it.
0:55:03 And, uh, is it right that you have, like, some super top-secret clearance?
0:55:08 Well, they haven’t told me where the aliens are, so I don’t know how high of a clearance I actually have.
0:55:10 Okay, I’ll cross that question off the list.
0:55:17 I’m, I’m like, I’m curious what, like, what do you have to do to get a, you know, a really high-level clearance?
0:55:23 Well, you just have to fill out a bunch of paperwork, um, and, and take, take a drug test.
0:55:30 Uh, but what I will say is that, uh, you know, holding a security clearance, um, you know, is, is not all fun, right?
0:55:36 Because you, you learn things about the world and you, you see things that you, you often can’t, can’t forget.
0:55:45 Um, so, although I was really thrilled when I first was granted a top-secret clearance, uh, there are days now that I, I wish I never had one.
0:55:45 Huh.
0:55:55 Because the world is scarier or, than, than you, than you would have thought?
0:56:05 Uh, the, the world is, is scarier and, and, and, and more dangerous and, and, uh, people, people sometimes do really, really awful things.
0:56:06 Yes.
0:56:08 Uh, anything else you want to talk about?
0:56:17 Um, I would, I would just say, uh, to everybody that’s listening that, that now is an incredible time to be, uh, watching the world.
0:56:22 Because we, we really are seeing historic things happen almost every day.
0:56:35 And anybody that picks up a news story about Ukraine or about China or, or about the Middle East, it, it’s sort of like reading the papers, I suppose, you know, in the run-up to the First World War, the, the Second World War.
0:56:45 You just see things that are so striking, um, and that tell you so much about where the, the world is going, uh, that, that, uh, uh, it’s worth, it’s worth paying attention.
0:56:50 I got nervous when you said run-up to the First World War or Second World War.
0:57:00 Well, I, I, I, I say that quite, quite specifically in the sense that, you know, warfare is changing remarkably fast.
0:57:13 And we’ve seen a succession of advanced militaries fail, uh, the Russian military, uh, the Israeli military, uh, demonstrably failed, uh, during the attacks that Hamas waged on October the 7th.
0:57:22 And I think it would be, uh, hubris to imagine that our military, the American military, couldn’t fail in a similar way.
0:57:29 So that’s why I think it’s really important, uh, to pay attention to what’s happening in conflict around the world.
0:57:39 Um, and, 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 accustomed to in being able to project military power.
0:57:50 Christopher Kirkoff is an advisor at the Defense Innovation Union.
0:57:54 Today’s show was produced by Gabriel Hunter Chang.
0:57:58 It was edited by Lydia Jean Cott and engineered by Sarah Brugier.
0:58:02 You can email us at problem at pushkin.fm.
0:58:06 I’m Jacob Goldstein, and we’ll be back next week with another episode of What’s Your Problem?
0:58:25 Something unexpected happened after Jeremy Scott confessed to killing Michelle Schofield in Bone Valley Season 1.
0:58:30 Every time I hear about my dad, it’s, oh, he’s a killer. He’s just straight evil.
0:58:35 I was becoming the bridge between Jeremy Scott and the son he’d never known.
0:58:37 At the end of the day, I’m literally a son of a killer.
0:58:46 Listen to new episodes of Bone Valley Season 2 starting April 9th on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
0:00:13 Every time I hear about my dad, it’s, oh, he’s a killer. He’s just straight evil.
0:00:17 I was becoming the bridge between Jeremy Scott and the son he’d never known.
0:00:20 At the end of the day, I’m literally a son of a killer.
0:00:29 Listen to new episodes of Bone Valley Season 2 starting April 9th on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
0:00:49 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.
0:00:55 It could be a friendly drone. It could be an enemy drone. It could be a reconnaissance drone.
0:00:58 Or it could be a drone that is trying to kill you.
0:01:10 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.
0:01:14 This technological change has profound implications.
0:01:17 It gives smaller countries, like Ukraine, new ways to fight.
0:01:29 And it means the militaries of big traditional powers, militaries built on 20th-century technologies like tanks and aircraft carriers, need to radically change just to keep up.
0:01:37 I’m Jacob Goldstein, and this is What’s Your Problem?
0:01:39 My guest today is Christopher Kirchhoff.
0:01:46 Nine years ago, Christopher helped to start the Defense Innovation Unit, a Defense Department office in Silicon Valley.
0:01:48 He currently works as an advisor there.
0:01:55 Christopher says, in many ways, the U.S. military has failed to keep up with the way military technology has changed.
0:01:58 That, fundamentally, is the problem DIU is trying to solve.
0:02:05 How can the giant bureaucracy that is the U.S. military catch up with the latest military technology?
0:02:09 Christopher is a civilian.
0:02:13 He had a bunch of national security-related jobs in the Obama administration.
0:02:19 And he recently co-wrote a book about his work at the Defense Innovation Unit, the DIU.
0:02:23 Christopher and I talk about the book and the DIU later in the interview.
0:02:28 But to start, we talked about the weapons and tech being used in the war in Ukraine.
0:02:42 So, I mean, it seems in some ways like the war in Ukraine is some version of the war or the kind of war you’ve been thinking about for a long time, years and years.
0:02:47 Well, I’ve always looked at Ukraine, you know, at sort of two levels.
0:02:52 The first, of course, is that it’s just a very tragic and, frankly, needless war.
0:03:00 You know, there’s very few reasons, right, ever to go to war.
0:03:05 And this is a particularly stupid war that’s just going to cost a lot of young men and women their lives.
0:03:07 So, it’s tragic.
0:03:13 And I’m terribly sorry for the suffering of the Ukrainian people and, frankly, the suffering of the young conscripted Russian soldiers as well.
0:03:15 So, let me just say that to start.
0:03:34 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 rise of commercial technologies that it was obvious could be weaponized and weaponized at scale.
0:03:47 And, I mean, I remember sitting on the e-ring in the Pentagon watching YouTube videos of drones, you know, first of all, quadcopters flying around, you know, first singly, then in pairs, then doing dances.
0:03:56 And it was really easy to imagine that at some point in the future, those drones could themselves also be carrying payloads of various kinds.
0:04:01 And not only that, but, I mean, these are drones that, you know, you could order on Amazon, right?
0:04:07 They were a few hundred dollars, so they were incredibly inexpensive to begin experimenting with.
0:04:18 So, all the ingredients were there for a complete revolution in the tools with which war could be fought.
0:04:28 And they came together kind of all at once in a way when Russian armored columns began advancing in Ukraine.
0:04:39 Right. I mean, it’s kind of easy to forget now, but at the time when Russia invaded Ukraine, it seems like the basic conventional wisdom was,
0:04:45 oh, giant country with a huge army invading, they’re going to win in a week.
0:04:46 And that didn’t happen.
0:04:55 I mean, what role did this sort of new set of technologies play in allowing Ukraine to defend itself?
0:05:02 Well, you know, the technologies actually came into play even before the invasion commenced.
0:05:08 And one of the most visible ways that came into play is, I mean, this is the first war in a way
0:05:16 where there’s so many private imagery companies that have their own satellite constellations that are beaming back to Earth,
0:05:23 high-resolution imagery, resolution of the order of what would have been, you know, a Cold War spy satellite just a few years ago.
0:05:31 And this, importantly, these images weren’t just going to, you know, the U.S. government or to other militaries.
0:05:34 They were available to anybody that wanted to see them.
0:05:42 And so when Putin and the Kremlin was issuing statements to the effect that, no, they weren’t going to invade Ukraine,
0:05:49 in fact, they were demobilizing the Russian military and preparing to ship material back to Russia by rail,
0:05:56 the Biden administration was able to release commercial imagery that showed, you know, no.
0:06:01 In fact, there’s armored columns lining up on the border, ready to go.
0:06:06 I mean, the fact that it was commercial means you didn’t even need the Biden administration, right?
0:06:12 Like anybody who paid for a subscription could see that the Russian tanks were there, right?
0:06:13 Exactly.
0:06:16 And so, and this carried on then.
0:06:18 So the invasion, you know, begins.
0:06:30 And the Ukrainians not only have eyes and ears from this commercial data feeds, not just imagery, but also radio frequency intelligence.
0:06:39 And that gets paired quickly with Starlink at a moment when, you know, the Russians are using very advanced cyber attacks
0:06:46 to attempt to take down not only the internet in Ukraine, but also the command and control structure of the Ukrainian military.
0:06:50 And what, what then happened next was really quite unique and amazing.
0:07:03 The Ukrainian government had become quite adept at offering digital services to its citizens, both, both through online websites and through a smartphone app that the government built.
0:07:15 In fact, Zelensky actually campaigned as somebody who would bring in a new generation of digital services, whether it was taxes or, you know, the ability to incorporate online.
0:07:31 So, so the Ukrainian government very quickly reconfigured a smartphone app that Ukrainians used every day in their ordinary lives to, to allow Ukrainians to be able to send in spot reports of, you know, I just saw a tank column moving past my town.
0:07:34 So you basically just pull out your phone and open your app.
0:07:38 And instead of whatever, calling an Uber, you say, I just saw a tank.
0:07:39 Well, yeah.
0:07:42 So the nickname for this became Uber for artillery.
0:07:57 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.
0:07:58 So, okay.
0:08:02 So that’s the sort of initial state of play.
0:08:05 And then there is this evolution, right?
0:08:07 It seems like it’s three years now, a long time.
0:08:15 There has been this really intense, yeah, evolution, innovation, right, on both sides.
0:08:16 Talk to me about that.
0:08:22 How has technology driven this sort of rapid evolution of warfighting over the last few years?
0:08:34 Well, Ukraine has been described, the Ukrainian military has been described, you know, as a military that already came with a Silicon Valley wing attached to it.
0:08:41 Because Ukraine, you know, over the last two decades has redefined itself as a country of programmers.
0:08:46 It has a large endemic IT industry that was, you know, there before the war.
0:08:54 And the Ukrainian government was really smart in that it mobilized, of course, military-age males to serve.
0:08:56 It really is a citizen army in that respect.
0:09:08 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 the military developing technology.
0:09:23 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.
0:09:42 And this mattered because as soon as the Russians got their advanced electronic warfare systems to the front and move them forward and turn them on, even advanced Western drones that either Ukraine already had in its inventory or were rushed in in the opening weeks of the war became essentially ineffective.
0:09:53 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 rolled out.
0:09:56 So the Russians were essentially jamming the drones in some way.
0:10:04 They had some kind of technology that rendered sort of off-the-shelf or even military-grade drones ineffective.
0:10:31 The jamming was so powerful that if you were in Kiev and, you know, say you were on the third or fourth floor of a hotel and you tried to order an Uber, your location on the map in the Uber app would show up in the middle of the Indian Ocean because the GPS jamming was so effective that even in cities, it wasn’t possible to pick up a reliable signal that, you know, cities that were 100 miles from the front.
0:10:38 So at the front, the electromagnetic spectrum was just flooded with energy.
0:10:53 And that caused right away, it touched off this technology race to invent drones that could essentially fly on their own, even through incredibly intense jamming.
0:11:03 And so the Ukrainians, and it was remarkable to go see when my co-author Rajshan and I got a chance to visit Ukraine a year and a half ago.
0:11:25 We went to a number of drone companies and they have essentially, the Ukrainians, in a matter of months, recreated the entire 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, you know, dropping bombs down chimneys.
0:11:40 So the Ukrainians have, in essence, used a combination of open source software and low-cost hardware to recreate everything from the function of our AWACS planes.
0:11:49 These are the airline-looking airplanes with the giant radar drones on top that provide a kind of God’s eye view of the battlefield.
0:11:55 So they literally have drones whose sole purpose is to keep track of large parts of the battlefield.
0:12:06 To other smaller surveillance drones that will go take pictures of a specific area that the Ukrainians want to target.
0:12:14 They’ll relay that imagery back, kind of almost like miniature U-2 spy planes flying and, you know, dropping film canisters and whatnot.
0:12:35 And they’ll quickly be able to then load the images of Russian 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 targets with fully, you know, on fully autonomous routes, right?
0:12:41 That don’t require phoning home for them either to navigate or have permission to engage.
0:12:47 On top of that, you actually have the Ukrainians using open source software to fuse different sensor streams.
0:13:05 So you can have a Ukrainian commander that on a tablet computer in front of them has data feeds from surveillance drones that are relaying video in real time to maps of the electronic warfare spectrum.
0:13:17 You know, it’s really incredible what they’ve been able to do for essentially pennies on the dollar of what the American military has spent to recreate the same technological stack.
0:13:21 So you went to Ukraine a year and a half ago or so.
0:13:24 You mentioned a couple of the places you visited.
0:13:29 One of them is sort of a, had been a Ukrainian version of like Best Buy, right?
0:13:30 And it had been transformed.
0:13:31 Tell me about that.
0:13:43 Yeah, it was wild running around the city of Kyiv, visiting a number of the places that the government had commandeered for the war effort.
0:13:49 And so one of these places was an old literal, you know, Ukraine’s version of Best Buy, a big box store essentially.
0:13:58 And on the wall were still signs saying, you know, televisions, appliances, you know, there were ads for washing machines, you know, on the wall.
0:14:07 It was like walking to a Best Buy, but instead of there being a whole bunch of electronics for you to buy, there were benches, workbenches laid out in assembly line style rows.
0:14:15 And this particular electronics store was being used to mass produce quadcopter kamikaze drones.
0:14:22 So at one end of the assembly line, you would start with the frame of the drone.
0:14:43 And by the time you got to the other end, you would have a completely working drone with communication software ready to be mated with either an anti-personnel charge or a shaped charge to go through armor, you know, a couple kilogram charge that would create these inexpensive mass-produced quadcopters into quite potent weapons.
0:14:47 When you say a charge, should I think bomb?
0:14:49 It’s basically a little bomb, right?
0:14:50 Yeah, larger than a grenade.
0:14:51 Yeah.
0:15:00 And then it would, so it would 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?
0:15:01 They sure would.
0:15:17 And this goes back to the incredibly novel hybrid warfare that we see 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.
0:15:24 There are, there are trench lines, there is artillery, there is artillery, there are tanks and mechanized infantry that are moving around.
0:15:35 But at the same time, in the trenches are drone pilots and they are launching armed drones and reconnaissance drones that are watching enemy movements behind enemy lines.
0:15:45 And so the battle, you know, in World War I or World War II typically happened at the front where forces actually came into contact with one another.
0:15:49 Today, drone warfare is pushing the battle behind the front.
0:15:51 It makes the front sort of more porous.
0:15:52 Exactly.
0:16:06 So if you’re, for example, you know, a Russian army unit and you’re trying to advance into Ukrainian territory, you have to bring your tanks and your armored personnel carriers with your infantry towards the front.
0:16:15 Well, the Ukrainians got in the habit of using their inexpensive kamikaze drones to loiter and track armored personnel carriers.
0:16:21 And at the moment at which troops would disembark the armored personnel carrier to move towards the front, they would strike.
0:16:22 Uh-huh.
0:16:32 So this, you know, long-range or sort of short-range precision strike has completely changed how the war is being fought.
0:16:35 It’s being fought unlike any other war in modern times.
0:16:37 So the war has been going on for a few years.
0:16:44 Both Russia and Ukraine have clearly been learning and, you know, developing new technology at this incredibly rapid pace.
0:16:51 How does the war in Ukraine look different now than it did three years ago or two years ago, shortly after it started?
0:17:15 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 confused invasion where massive Russian armored columns rushed in at multiple points in the country.
0:17:18 They were ultimately beaten back to a certain point.
0:17:22 Those lines, you know, over time came to freeze.
0:17:31 Because each side has very potent precision strike weapons, it’s very hard to change those lines.
0:17:34 In other words, the defense, in a way, has an advantage.
0:17:47 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.
0:17:56 But what’s going on behind them has been this incredible combat through cycles of innovation.
0:18:02 who can come up with better electronic countermeasures, who can come up with the next generation of drones that will defeat them.
0:18:09 And so both the Russians and the Ukrainians have been innovating behind the front lines and then bringing that technology forward.
0:18:22 So does the war look different in some way now than it did a couple years ago, or is it different on such a subtle level, like the GPS jamming is better and the countermeasures are better, and so the net effect is the same?
0:18:37 So today, there are such effective small scale kamikaze drones that they can effectively hunt individuals.
0:18:58 So we are truly today in a Black Mirror episode where if you’re a civilian 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.
0:19:01 I mean, how do you survive a kamikaze drone attack?
0:19:03 You essentially have to take cover.
0:19:11 And so oftentimes, you know, the sound of a drone buzzing, you know, and this is the challenge, right?
0:19:17 Because on every square mile of the front, there are probably a dozen or more drones in the air at any given time.
0:19:22 So if you’re fighting this war, there’s basically always a drone flying over your head.
0:19:26 And maybe it’s coming to kill you personally, and maybe it’s not.
0:19:32 The airspace on both sides of the line is incredibly overrun with drones.
0:19:35 I mean, they are literally smacking into each other in the air.
0:19:38 It’s like flocks of birds at this point.
0:19:42 So, no, the changes we’re seeing, frankly, are not subtle at all.
0:19:43 They’re quite dramatic.
0:19:47 So what has the U.S. learned from the war in Ukraine?
0:19:53 It’s woken the United States and our allies up in two very profound ways.
0:20:06 The first is that, you know, it turns out we had not been stockpiling adequate material for war, whether it was howards or shells or anti-tank missiles or sophisticated rockets.
0:20:13 We had basically, you know, ran to the storage cupboard and found it to be almost bare.
0:20:15 And that’s very alarming.
0:20:20 You know, it happened because, of course, munitions, when the budget gets tight, it’s easy to say, oh, we’ll buy more next year.
0:20:22 So that’s how we ended up in that situation.
0:20:27 So we discovered a crisis, actually, of military readiness on our side.
0:20:38 And we discovered a manufacturing base, more than that, that was not easily able to be mobilized because many factories that produce these weapons have been idle for years or even shuttered.
0:20:50 And in a world in which supply chains are threatened globally, if you can’t assume the seas are going to be safe for transit, you have to be able to manufacture this weaponry within your borders.
0:20:53 But there was an even more profound wake-up call.
0:20:56 And let’s just go back to the use of kamikaze drones.
0:21:02 We gave the Ukrainians very early in the war 31 M1A1 Abrams battle tanks.
0:21:05 These are the most sophisticated battle tank in the world.
0:21:08 We’ve all, you know, seen pictures of them.
0:21:16 You can be driving down the highway in an Abrams, you know, battle tank at 70 miles an hour, and you can decide which window of a skyscraper to put around through.
0:21:18 I mean, it’s an incredible piece of hardware.
0:21:27 And almost all 31 of those tanks have been destroyed or disabled by Russian kamikaze drones that each cost no more than a few thousand dollars a piece.
0:21:29 And what’s the tank cost?
0:21:33 The tank cost, oh gosh, I don’t know, 12 or 15 million dollars or maybe more.
0:21:47 So that tells me and other military strategists that if you’re an army who bought a lot of tanks and you presume that your military strength comes from those tanks,
0:21:52 you could easily be surprised by an adversary using really inexpensive kamikaze drones.
0:21:58 In other words, the era of manned mechanized warfare is over.
0:22:04 In the same way that during the First World War, tanks showed us that the Calvary Age was coming to a close.
0:22:08 We are now at the end of the era of the battle tank.
0:22:14 So you’re saying tanks now are about as useful as horses were in 1915?
0:22:15 Yes.
0:22:21 What do we do about that?
0:22:24 What does that mean for the United States?
0:22:50 Well, the reason why, like Arthur and I, you know, wrote Unit X, a book all about just how far behind the U.S. military finds itself is that this phenomena of less expensive technology overcoming legacy weapon systems, you know, the sort of building blocks of the Cold War, American military, isn’t true just for tanks.
0:23:15 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 sunk the largest Russian ship, the Moskova, on the Black Sea.
0:23:21 So the, you know, naval strategists call the Russian fleet now being a fleet in being.
0:23:25 It’s a fleet kept in port because of cheap autonomous technology.
0:23:40 So in other words, many of the Americans’ most powerful military systems, aircraft carriers, battle tanks, battleships, may now no longer be as effective as they were just a few years ago.
0:23:52 I mean, so in terms of, like, changing the equilibrium, is the effect of essentially autonomous technology drones and then ship drones to give more power to countries with less money?
0:23:54 I mean, is that one effect?
0:23:56 Well, there’s two effects.
0:24:06 So the first and most obvious effect is that a country with fewer financial resources can amass larger degrees of military power.
0:24:15 But there’s a second and more insidious effect, which is that militaries are inherently conservative institutions for a couple reasons.
0:24:25 One, war is a very unforgiving teacher, and it’s almost impossible through just simulations alone to actually replicate combat conditions.
0:24:34 And so you can test new systems all you want, but you won’t actually have the confidence that they’re going to work in the way you expect them to work or want them to work until you go to war.
0:24:44 So this is what leads militaries to almost always perpetually be over-focused on winning the last war rather than winning the war that’s to come.
0:24:55 Still to come on the show, why the U.S. military is not ready to fight a war right now, according to Chris, and what it might take to change that.
0:25:12 Something unexpected happened after Jeremy Scott confessed to killing Michelle Schofield in Bone Valley Season 1.
0:25:14 I just knew him as a kid.
0:25:18 Long, silent voices from his past came forward.
0:25:20 And he was just staring at me.
0:25:23 And they had secrets of their own to share.
0:25:30 Um, Gilbert King. I’m the son of Jeremy Lynn Scott.
0:25:34 I was no longer just telling the story. I was part of it.
0:25:38 Every time I hear about my dad, it’s, oh, he’s a killer. He’s just straight evil.
0:25:43 I was becoming the bridge between a killer and the son he’d never known.
0:25:48 If the cops and everything would have done their job properly, my dad would have been in jail. I would have never existed.
0:25:51 I never expected to find myself in this place.
0:25:55 Now, I need to tell you how I got here.
0:25:58 At the end of the day, I’m literally a son of a killer.
0:26:00 Bone Valley Season 2.
0:26:02 Jeremy.
0:26:04 Jeremy, I want to tell you something.
0:26:13 Listen to new episodes of Bone Valley Season 2 starting April 9th on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
0:26:21 And to hear the entire new season ad-free with exclusive content starting April 9th, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts.
0:26:26 So, okay, there is this problem, right?
0:26:30 The U.S. military is not really keeping up with technological change.
0:26:34 And this is a problem that Christopher has been working on for a while now.
0:26:40 It’s a key part of the reason he was tapped to help launch the Defense Innovation Unit back in 2016.
0:26:49 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 Innovation Unit,
0:26:54 I asked Christopher about this story that he and his co-author tell in their book.
0:27:13 So, the combined air operations center is this nerve center that is in charge of running all air operations in the Middle East,
0:27:17 in an area that’s actually larger than the lower 48 states.
0:27:26 And so, any plane, any missile, any airstrike that goes on in this extraordinary piece of geography
0:27:33 is the responsibility of a set of airmen and women that operate in a base in Qatar.
0:27:40 And in 2016, you’ll remember there was a crisis in the Middle East.
0:27:47 ISIS was storming through countries, was encircling the Iraqi population,
0:27:55 in Mosul, was trying to prosecute the largest genocide of the 21st century against the Yazidi people who were trapped on Mount Sinjar.
0:28:02 And these civilians were kept alive only by an extraordinary campaign of U.S. airstrikes.
0:28:11 We were striking ISIS forces every few minutes, 24-7, for weeks on end,
0:28:15 in a bombing campaign that’s the highest intensity in history.
0:28:21 And to sustain a bombing campaign of this, you have to have, of course, fighter aircraft and surveillance,
0:28:23 but you also have to have refueling tankers.
0:28:26 These fighter jets are gas guzzlers.
0:28:30 They need to refill their gas tanks every 40 minutes or so.
0:28:35 And to do that, they have to mate up with air refueling tankers.
0:28:41 And this is actually a very complex thing to figure out because fighters come in different types.
0:28:42 They refuel at different altitudes.
0:28:44 They have different nozzles on them.
0:28:50 And if you have hundreds of aircraft a day aloft operating in combat support roles,
0:28:53 you need dozens of tankers to refuel them.
0:29:05 So how did the Air Force men and women in uniform and guitar orchestrate the complex planning of tanker routes?
0:29:07 Well, they used a whiteboard.
0:29:16 We showed up in 2016 and found people essentially operating like we did in World War II,
0:29:22 except instead of having a chalkboard and magnets, we had a whiteboard.
0:29:28 And they were having to do all these calculations by hand, which took an enormous number of hours.
0:29:29 Why by hand?
0:29:35 Because the computer program that was supposed to do this had broken and they were waiting for an upgrade.
0:29:42 But they had been waiting seven years for an upgrade that one of the large defense companies was in charge of developing
0:29:44 that was way over budget and way behind schedule.
0:29:46 They’d been waiting seven years for an upgrade.
0:29:52 And they were in the middle of this like multi-multi-million dollar command center the U.S. had built,
0:29:56 coordinating hundreds of flights all the time.
0:29:57 It gets worse.
0:30:04 So the minute that there is a deviation from the plan, whether that’s bad weather or, you know,
0:30:08 unexpected combat operations in a different area than you planned for,
0:30:10 now you have to redo the calculations on the fly.
0:30:17 So this is actually introducing a lot of unneeded risk in our combat operations that not only puts at risk
0:30:24 the men and women of the U.S. military, but also puts at risk the forces on the ground that we’re trying to protect
0:30:26 or the civilians we’re trying to defend.
0:30:33 You describe like somewhere in the process, there’d be like somebody with one spreadsheet and then there was another spreadsheet.
0:30:36 But like the two spreadsheets couldn’t like talk to each other.
0:30:36 Right.
0:30:40 So somebody had to read out the numbers to get it from one spreadsheet to the other.
0:30:47 You describe extra refueling flights all the time because they couldn’t, you know,
0:30:50 process the data fast enough essentially by hand.
0:30:55 They had multiple different databases they had to manually fuse together.
0:31:00 Somebody would literally stand behind the computer operator to make sure they were typing in the numbers right.
0:31:06 And it would take 50 person hours to put together the refueling plan for the next day.
0:31:13 So we realized this was an opportunity to show what Silicon Valley does best, which is rapid iteration,
0:31:18 you know, using software to create an optimization algorithm that could solve this in seconds.
0:31:21 Why hadn’t they just fixed it?
0:31:22 Let me ask the naive question.
0:31:26 Like it’s not, as a technical matter, it’s not a hard problem.
0:31:27 What was the actual problem?
0:31:34 So the problem is that the way the military buys technology and the way Silicon Valley makes it,
0:31:37 you know, it’s like, it’s like Mars and Venus.
0:31:39 They’re on two different planets.
0:31:44 So the military way, it’s called a requirements-based system of developing technology.
0:31:51 So a bunch of people sit in a windowless room and they imagine if I were to need a piece of technology
0:31:53 to help with their refueling, what should it look like?
0:31:58 And they write a bunch of specifications down that they think would be great.
0:31:59 So it’s drawn up in the abstract.
0:32:05 And then because contracting takes a lot in the military, oftentimes multiple generations
0:32:09 of technology come along before that system ever gets built.
0:32:12 But of course, it has to be built to the original specifications.
0:32:17 So the thing you get is basically a thing somebody designed 10 years ago.
0:32:18 Or more.
0:32:22 Which is so obviously a bad idea, right?
0:32:27 And I mean, certainly you make a compelling case in the book that it’s obviously a bad
0:32:27 idea.
0:32:29 Is there any counter argument?
0:32:32 Is there any case for the way they do it?
0:32:33 There is.
0:32:37 And we have to be very sympathetic to the people that are a part of the system because the system
0:32:40 actually was built to do something a little bit different.
0:32:46 And that is, you know, there aren’t too many companies that can build a nuclear-powered aircraft
0:32:49 carrier or a submarine or a fifth-generation stealth fighter.
0:32:55 And so you can’t exactly go on Amazon and comparison price shop if you’re the U.S.
0:32:55 government.
0:32:56 There is no market.
0:32:57 There is no market.
0:33:00 There is no market for a nuclear sub in a conventional sense.
0:33:00 Yeah.
0:33:07 So the defense procurement system and the associated auditing system that governs it is designed
0:33:16 to save taxpayer dollar by coming up with exceptionally precise specifications through which things must
0:33:16 be built.
0:33:22 And then a cost accounting system that is meant to make sure that the taxpayer is never overcharged
0:33:25 from the one or two companies that can supply this technology.
0:33:27 So it was built for a different era.
0:33:32 And in terms of building aircraft carriers, it actually does a reasonable job.
0:33:35 But commercial technology, you know, there is a market.
0:33:36 You don’t have to do it that way.
0:33:39 And in fact, doing it that way only slows you down.
0:33:49 So, okay, so you go, you see this terrible, inefficient, dangerous, expensive technology failure that is
0:33:53 happening at this base in Qatar.
0:33:53 What do you do?
0:33:57 We, uh, uh, uh, phone home.
0:34:20 So, uh, my co-author Raj, uh, got on the phone that night and, uh, we immediately, uh, uh, FedExed, uh, IMAX and deployed, uh, a few Air Force coders and a few coders from the Silicon Valley outfit pivotal to Qatar to sit side by side with, uh, the, the airmen and women doing the tanker planning.
0:34:27 And to build an automated app that they could use eventually to push a button and have this done.
0:34:32 And it took just over a million dollars and just over a hundred days to do it.
0:34:41 Um, and you said it saved a million dollars in excess flights in like a couple of days, right?
0:34:52 So before the, the Air Force had to actually keep a couple refueling tankers on standby to scramble because they weren’t able to pivot the plan fast enough.
0:34:59 And of course, each time you scramble an enormous 767 size aircraft full of kerosene, um, it’s energetically expensive.
0:35:11 So the tool that we use to optimize air tanker refueling actually has saved the Air Force today, uh, something like I think 24 million gallons of kerosene a year.
0:35:13 So we’re talking, you know, a lot of money of savings, right?
0:35:15 So this is, this is a no brainer.
0:35:16 Spend the money, automate it.
0:35:20 You get better mission outcomes, uh, for, for lower costs.
0:35:30 It’s the Silicon Valley way of, of co-developing technology with the users of iterating on a minimum, minimum viable, uh, product and then adding features to that product as you go along.
0:35:36 So this is like an early win, uh, in a fairly straightforward way.
0:35:44 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?
0:35:54 Get close to the user, see what they need, as opposed to like have a guy in Washington 10 years ago, drop a list of things he thinks people are going to need 10 years from now, right?
0:36:02 Uh, there are a couple of new companies selling weapons and technology to the government that seem worth talking about.
0:36:09 That seem quite different than the sort of 20th century giant, uh, military contractors, right?
0:36:15 Palantir and Anduril, uh, tell like, tell me about those two companies and how they fit with this broader story.
0:36:24 Well, it’s important to, to recognize that, uh, the defense contracts we have today, particularly the large ones that we know about the household names.
0:36:27 So Lockheed Martin, uh, Boeing, and so on and so forth.
0:36:40 They are really best thought of, um, kind of like utility companies as highly regulated, uh, enterprises that, that, that, that are not like traditional product companies.
0:36:51 Because they have to adhere to this, this massive system of cost accounting and auditing, um, this, you know, 2000, uh, page, you know, regulation that governs everything they do.
0:37:02 And so, in fact, the Pentagon has created these companies, um, and, and the way they operate, which is extraordinarily inefficient in terms of how modern technology is produced by the commercial sector.
0:37:13 So what’s so interesting about companies like Anduril, uh, like Palantir, like Shield AI, they are, uh, traditional product companies in the sense that Google and Microsoft are.
0:37:39 They are unburdened by, um, um, having to erect this massive separate accounting system to deal 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 29-year-old employee, Lauren Daly, came up with, uh, by staying up late at night and, and reading congressional legislation.
0:37:46 Basically a way that the Department of Defense can buy weapons without going through the traditional 2000-page process.
0:37:47 Exactly.
0:37:52 It’s so amazing that that’s what’s driving the technological change, right?
0:37:55 In a way, not surprising, but quite interesting, right?
0:38:02 That this, this, the process ends up driving the outcome, you know, in a backwards way.
0:38:09 Well, political scientists and sociologists all, you know, are always keen to look at what’s, you know, structures are operating.
0:38:15 And, and there is, of course, a whole discipline that looks at public institutions, which are constrained quite a bit more than public companies.
0:38:22 So in one sense, it isn’t a surprise, but what is a surprise is, is the difference that one individual made in this.
0:38:42 So Lauren Daly, you know, the, the daughter of a tank driver, uh, somebody who entered, uh, the army as an acquisition specialist, that’s her way of serving the country, uh, figures out that there’s a loophole, like Congress, that a renegade Senate staffer is just inserted in the National Defense Authorization Act that, that DIU can drive a truck through.
0:39:01 And in a matter of weeks, uh, through some hustling at the Pentagon and the support of Ash Carter, we codified this new method of procuring technology called the commercial solutions offering that essentially allowed us to negotiate with companies for a few weeks, very openly in a very conversational way on commercial terms.
0:39:05 So the way they were used to negotiating, so the way they were used to negotiating and then to sign a contract.
0:39:06 So this was a game changer.
0:39:17 And I am so proud to report that since 2016 to date, about $80 billion of technology acquisition by the Department of Defense has gone through this new mechanism.
0:39:29 And in fact, last week, uh, Trump Secretary of Defense, Pete Hexeth signed out a memo mandating that all software bought by the Department of Defense be acquired using this means,
0:39:34 not the old 2,000 page, uh, 2,000 page way.
0:39:35 Huh.
0:39:43 So it’s sort of the end of the old, pretty clearly bad way of buying software for the military.
0:39:44 Yes.
0:39:47 And, and so, you know, there’s two things to keep in mind here.
0:39:56 You know, one, um, it doesn’t make sense to use a 2,000 page rule book, uh, to buy things where you don’t need it, where there’s, where there’s an actual market.
0:40:03 But the second thing that’s really important, you know, we would never go to Microsoft or Amazon and ask them to build an aircraft carrier.
0:40:09 So why were we going to Raytheon or Lockheed Martin and asking them or Northrop Grumman to build software?
0:40:11 It’s not their core expertise.
0:40:21 So the, the Pentagon in the last, uh, eight years, thanks in part to its Silicon Valley office has gotten a lot smarter about how to procure advanced technology.
0:40:35 And so fast forward to today, uh, the most exciting contract, uh, the air force is letting to build, uh, up to potentially 10,000 supersonic autonomous drones that will fight alongside our fifth generation man fighters.
0:40:44 That, that, that contract, uh, went to, uh, Anderall and General Atomics, not to Boeing, not to Lockheed, not to one of the prime.
0:40:54 So we’re seeing this complete sea change in who, uh, is being successful at, at pulling down the, the biggest contracts with the, with the most advanced technology come out of the department today.
0:41:06 Do you think the U.S. is ready to fight a war right now?
0:41:07 No.
0:41:09 Go on.
0:41:27 We are in the unfortunate position of having made major decadal investments in weapon systems, uh, that have essentially reached the end of their lifespan.
0:41:30 You mean like tanks and aircraft carriers?
0:41:31 Yes.
0:41:38 Just not, not a particular tank or aircraft carrier, but just any tank or aircraft carrier is now basically obsolete.
0:41:42 And, and, and we have a, uh, a three-part challenge.
0:41:50 We’re not yet exactly sure because we haven’t experimented enough what technology to buy to replace them.
0:41:57 We’re also not sure exactly how to use that new technology and what the military calls concepts of operation.
0:42:05 So when we invented carrier aviation, that’s a whole new way of using aircraft to fight naval battles.
0:42:06 Right.
0:42:10 You have to figure out what to do with 10,000 supersonic drones.
0:42:21 And the third problem we have is that, uh, once we do figure out what technology to buy and what operating concepts to insert them into, we have to scale that up.
0:42:29 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?
0:42:32 Uh, yes, that is the fourth problem.
0:42:41 Um, the Biden administration shifted less than 1% of the Department of Defense’s procurement budget towards, um, autonomous weapons.
0:42:44 Less than 1% meaning basically zero.
0:42:45 Basically zero.
0:42:46 Yes.
0:42:52 So I feel like that’s a bigger problem than the other three.
0:42:54 And I mean, that comes through in the book in a way, right?
0:43:02 Like, your antagonist in the book, in a narrative sense, is not Russia or China or ISIS, right?
0:43:03 It’s bureaucrats.
0:43:10 It’s, it’s, you know, you go to Capitol Hill and somebody’s like, we’re going to take your money away because you’re not spending any money in Indiana.
0:43:12 And that’s where my congressman is from.
0:43:15 Um, and it seems like that is still a problem.
0:43:17 It is.
0:43:30 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 Middle East, what’s happening elsewhere.
0:43:38 And, and so we’re in this situation where the ordinary way we buy technology and manage the military won’t work.
0:43:40 If we keep doing it, we’re going to walk the plank.
0:43:49 So we’re now in a, in a fierce battle to outmaneuver our own system, to transform it, uh, before there’s another conflict.
0:43:56 Frankly, it’s hard for me to imagine the kind of change you’re suggesting is needed.
0:44:04 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 me to imagine.
0:44:08 I mean, unless there was a war, which I don’t want to happen, obviously, right?
0:44:09 Like, I don’t know.
0:44:10 What do you, what do you think is going to happen?
0:44:17 Well, you know, to make a more optimistic case, there are a lot of things that are now going in our favor.
0:44:30 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 uses technology.
0:44:35 And at the same time, there’s a new commitment in industry.
0:44:46 We have a very dynamic economy, United States of America, with venture-backed investment, uh, creating small-scale infusions of technology that, that scales up companies in incredible ways.
0:45:04 So, since Defense Innovation Unit figured out this more, uh, seamless way to quickly buy technology and actually make the government a good customer in Silicon Valley, there’s been about $250 billion of venture funds now in play to back defense tech startups like Anderall.
0:45:07 Anderall is among the most successful, but there are hundreds more.
0:45:18 So, the market is already responding, and today there is more dynamic invention going on in the defense tech sector than I think anywhere else.
0:45:31 And, and so if the consensus in the Pentagon and Congress can actually be changed into, uh, you know, shifts in the budget, uh, we will quickly, uh, be, be headed in the right direction.
0:45:36 I was with you until you said if consensus in the Pentagon and Congress can be changed, right?
0:45:41 Like, that’s, like, that’s, like, there’s so much money there and so much inertia.
0:45:55 And, like, the government seems quite bad in many domains at changing when change is needed that it seems, I don’t know, you think that might happen?
0:45:57 It seems unlikely to me.
0:46:04 Well, um, you know, again, to, to paint the optimist picture, um.
0:46:06 Well, just for a sec, like, what do you think?
0:46:07 What do you think is going to happen?
0:46:17 I am worried that people now understand the problem, but the pendulum of change is going to swing too slowly.
0:46:18 Uh-huh.
0:46:27 So, um, I read that you recently did a residence at Anthropic, which is, uh, one of the big frontier AI companies.
0:46:29 It’s a large language model.
0:46:29 It’s a large language model.
0:46:35 And so I’m curious, this is very interesting to me, like, what did you learn there?
0:46:40 Like, what do you know now that you didn’t know before you, you, uh, were there?
0:46:47 The United States is unquestionably right now ahead, uh, at least by a little bit in artificial intelligence.
0:46:51 So it’s, it’s a technology that we’re better at than anybody else.
0:47:08 And so I think that the, the sort of $64 million question in terms of military strategy for United States is whether or not we can harness AI in, uh, designing a new military, uh, because right now that is the one thing that, that will give us an unquestioned advantage on the battlefield.
0:47:14 I mean, more generally, how do you think about AI in the future of war?
0:47:18 I mean, what does it mean for, for the equilibrium?
0:47:27 And what does it mean for the sort of relative abilities of big countries and small countries and kind of, you know, rogue actors?
0:47:30 Like, how, how does it change the power dynamics?
0:47:40 Well, I’m really glad you use the word equilibrium because it’s a, it’s a core concept, uh, in, in strategy.
0:47:48 Uh, there’s a whole literature on something called strategic stability, and it’s a literature that comes out in part of the cold war.
0:47:59 It’s a, it’s a literature that, that has to reckon with the counterintuitive finding that the proliferation of nuclear weapons, in other words, the more countries that became nuclear powers,
0:48:03 the less incidents of conflict between them there were.
0:48:10 So nuclear weapons and incredibly dangerous technology in a strange way actually made the world safer.
0:48:11 So far.
0:48:12 So far.
0:48:14 Now, would this hold true if everybody had a nuclear weapon?
0:48:16 Probably not.
0:48:16 Right.
0:48:22 And there’s also a, a tail risk where it’s like, maybe this was just the lucky, whatever, 80 years.
0:48:23 But go on.
0:48:25 Yeah, so far, so far.
0:48:32 So I think that the, the question is what will AI do to strategic stability?
0:48:32 Yeah.
0:48:42 Will it actually, uh, enhance it in the following sense of AI is clearly going to make warfare much more destructive than it is today.
0:48:47 And, and, and more destructive systems will raise the cost of going to war.
0:49:01 And so if, 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 or starting a war will be massively costly.
0:49:13 So it could be that AI as a very diffuse technology, um, actually increases deterrence in effect, uh, creating a higher bar to starting a war.
0:49:31 The optimistic scenario, uh, the truly optimistic scenario is that not only does AI, the diffusion of AI technology make great power war less likely, but, uh, because there are going to be some bad actors that get ahold of this stuff and, uh, go cause a ruckus.
0:49:43 That’s actually going to increase the interest of nations like the U S and China working together to ensure they retain their own sovereignty and not playing the means of violence to keep their citizens safe.
0:49:50 So it could actually not only decrease the likelihood of great power war, it could increase international cooperation because we desperately need it.
0:49:52 If we’re all going to stay safe.
0:50:07 Now there is, of course, a darker alternative, um, one flavor of that darker alternative is that there is a country that believes they have a breakout, uh, uh, uh, you know, AI and that it, that changes for them.
0:50:15 The calculus of, 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.
0:50:17 Also, I mean, there’s no other danger too.
0:50:33 We have to remember that, you know, Vietnam started because, uh, in part, uh, the U S Navy thought its destroyers were attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin, leading the, you know, U S Congress to pass the Gulf of Tonkin resolutions, which later led to, uh, the deployment of troops in Vietnam.
0:50:35 Well, it turns out the attack never happened.
0:50:37 It was just mass confusion.
0:50:44 Uh, and so AI introduces a lot more uncertainty into the battlefield that, that is a risk that is, that is worth knowing.
0:50:53 And then a truly dark scenario is that, uh, AI allows small groups, um, to project lethality in a way that’s very hard to control.
0:50:55 What do you, what do you mean when you say that?
0:51:12 Well, it means that you could go buy 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, uh, with the most advanced police force or Homeland Security force or military and still cause a bunch of damage.
0:51:15 So that is indeed a very legitimate worry.
0:51:24 It always has been AI would just be the latest technological innovation to land in the hands of bad actors that are looking to do bad things.
0:51:30 We’ll be back in a minute with the lightning round.
0:51:47 Something unexpected happened after Jeremy Scott confessed to killing Michelle Schofield in Bone Valley season one.
0:51:49 I just knew him as a kid.
0:51:54 Long, silent voices from his past came forward.
0:51:56 And he was just staring at me.
0:51:58 And they had secrets of their own to share.
0:52:01 Um, Gilbert King.
0:52:05 I’m the son of Jeremy Lynn Scott.
0:52:08 I was no longer just telling the story.
0:52:09 I was part of it.
0:52:12 Every time I hear about my dad is, oh, he’s a killer.
0:52:14 He’s just straight evil.
0:52:18 I was becoming the bridge between a killer and the son he’d never known.
0:52:22 If the cops and everything would have done their job properly, my dad would have been in jail.
0:52:23 I would have never existed.
0:52:27 I never expected to find myself in this place.
0:52:31 Now, I need to tell you how I got here.
0:52:33 At the end of the day, I’m literally a son of a killer.
0:52:36 Bone Valley, season two.
0:52:37 Jeremy.
0:52:39 Jeremy, I want to tell you something.
0:52:48 Listen to new episodes of Bone Valley, season two, starting April 9th on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
0:52:57 And to hear the entire new season ad-free with exclusive content starting April 9th, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts.
0:53:00 Okay.
0:53:06 Um, let’s finish with the lightning round, which is going to be a little, uh, lighter.
0:53:10 It’s going to be lighter, um, than the rest of this conversation.
0:53:21 Um, I read in a bio of yours online that you have backpacked in over 30 countries, including a trek from Moscow to Singapore over land.
0:53:26 Um, and I’m curious about, about that trip in particular.
0:53:30 Um, what was one really bad moment on that trip?
0:53:45 I’ll go with, uh, 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.
0:53:55 So I had to, while I was hallucinating, climb down, um, to, uh, use the bathroom every few minutes, um, uh, late, late one night.
0:53:58 But I will say it was an incredible trip that night.
0:54:03 I want to get to the incredible trip part, but what was the nature of the hallucination?
0:54:08 Uh, I, I, it was like profoundly lifelike dreams.
0:54:09 Uh-huh.
0:54:25 And I recognized at the time for, you know, what they were, uh, and it was just bizarre to be, you know, on this rural farm in eastern Siberia, hallucinating, trying to climb down a ladder, uh, so I don’t, you know, crap where I’m sleeping.
0:54:26 Yes, yes.
0:54:29 Uh, okay, you were going to say how great the trip was.
0:54:30 Tell me that part.
0:54:43 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 at about 20 miles an hour, Europe turn into Asia.
0:54:47 And we brought history books along and read them.
0:54:50 And it was an incredible education.
0:54:52 And, uh, I’m so glad we took that trip.
0:54:54 Uh, it certainly shaped how I see the world.
0:54:56 And, uh, I’ll never forget it.
0:55:03 And, uh, is it right that you have, like, some super top-secret clearance?
0:55:08 Well, they haven’t told me where the aliens are, so I don’t know how high of a clearance I actually have.
0:55:10 Okay, I’ll cross that question off the list.
0:55:17 I’m, I’m like, I’m curious what, like, what do you have to do to get a, you know, a really high-level clearance?
0:55:23 Well, you just have to fill out a bunch of paperwork, um, and, and take, take a drug test.
0:55:30 Uh, but what I will say is that, uh, you know, holding a security clearance, um, you know, is, is not all fun, right?
0:55:36 Because you, you learn things about the world and you, you see things that you, you often can’t, can’t forget.
0:55:45 Um, so, although I was really thrilled when I first was granted a top-secret clearance, uh, there are days now that I, I wish I never had one.
0:55:45 Huh.
0:55:55 Because the world is scarier or, than, than you, than you would have thought?
0:56:05 Uh, the, the world is, is scarier and, and, and, and more dangerous and, and, uh, people, people sometimes do really, really awful things.
0:56:06 Yes.
0:56:08 Uh, anything else you want to talk about?
0:56:17 Um, I would, I would just say, uh, to everybody that’s listening that, that now is an incredible time to be, uh, watching the world.
0:56:22 Because we, we really are seeing historic things happen almost every day.
0:56:35 And anybody that picks up a news story about Ukraine or about China or, or about the Middle East, it, it’s sort of like reading the papers, I suppose, you know, in the run-up to the First World War, the, the Second World War.
0:56:45 You just see things that are so striking, um, and that tell you so much about where the, the world is going, uh, that, that, uh, uh, it’s worth, it’s worth paying attention.
0:56:50 I got nervous when you said run-up to the First World War or Second World War.
0:57:00 Well, I, I, I, I say that quite, quite specifically in the sense that, you know, warfare is changing remarkably fast.
0:57:13 And we’ve seen a succession of advanced militaries fail, uh, the Russian military, uh, the Israeli military, uh, demonstrably failed, uh, during the attacks that Hamas waged on October the 7th.
0:57:22 And I think it would be, uh, hubris to imagine that our military, the American military, couldn’t fail in a similar way.
0:57:29 So that’s why I think it’s really important, uh, to pay attention to what’s happening in conflict around the world.
0:57:39 Um, and, 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 accustomed to in being able to project military power.
0:57:50 Christopher Kirkoff is an advisor at the Defense Innovation Union.
0:57:54 Today’s show was produced by Gabriel Hunter Chang.
0:57:58 It was edited by Lydia Jean Cott and engineered by Sarah Brugier.
0:58:02 You can email us at problem at pushkin.fm.
0:58:06 I’m Jacob Goldstein, and we’ll be back next week with another episode of What’s Your Problem?
0:58:25 Something unexpected happened after Jeremy Scott confessed to killing Michelle Schofield in Bone Valley Season 1.
0:58:30 Every time I hear about my dad, it’s, oh, he’s a killer. He’s just straight evil.
0:58:35 I was becoming the bridge between Jeremy Scott and the son he’d never known.
0:58:37 At the end of the day, I’m literally a son of a killer.
0:58:46 Listen to new episodes of Bone Valley Season 2 starting April 9th on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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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