The Pentagon’s Innovation Insurgents

Chris Kirchhoff was a founding member of the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) and previously worked in the Obama NSC. He recently published a book called Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley Are Transforming the Future of War. He wrote:

“To the extent present military and civilian leadership is articulating its strategy, it is one built, for the most part, on a continuation of previous programmatic and budgetary trendlines. If there is a strategy for losing a future war in China, this is it.”

Unit X traces the evolution of the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), a group of Pentagon insurgents who are fighting to change how the DoD relates to emerging technologies.

We discuss:

• The origin story of DIU and its early struggles to break Pentagon bureaucracy;
• How DIU leveraged “waiver authority” to circumvent red tape under Defense Secretary Ash Carter;
• Why the defense industrial base is ill-equipped to keep pace with technological change;
• The case for shifting more DoD spending to non-traditional tech companies;
• Lessons from commercial spaceflight for future AI governance, including potential issues with a “Manhattan project for AI.”

Outtro music: 告五人 Accusefive - 愛人錯過 Somewhere in Time (Youtube Link)

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