Irregular Warfare Podcast - DIU: Silicon Valley Meets the Modern Battlefield

Episode Date: September 20, 2024

Episode 114 examines the formation of the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) and its mission to integrate Silicon Valley technology within the Department of Defense innovation sphere. The guests are the co-authors of Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley are Transforming the Future of War, which is the foundation for the conversation.   Our guests begin by outlining DIU’s origin and mission emphasizing the importance of commercial technology in deterring and winning future conflicts. Our guests then discuss the challenges DIU faced with skepticism about the role of young companies in Silicon Valley and the bureaucratic problems associated with the DoD’s current budgeting and acquisition processes. They then provide insight into DIU’s core concept of operationalizing commercial technology faster than adversaries as a mean of supporting the National Defense Strategy. Lastly, they discuss adversarial approaches to innovation and use examples from both historical and contemporary conflicts to highlight important lessons learned for policy makers and practitioners.

You know, I think the core principle of that was delivering mission outcome. Let's find important technology, let's get it into the hands of the warfighter, and let's do it at a speed that's relevant for startups. And we wanted to focus specifically on commercial technology that was more or less the phrases out here, off the shelf. So technology that you could buy, you didn't really have to modify.

It wasn't a science experiment per se. It wouldn't take bench lab work or engineering work to make function in a military mission. And by limiting Defense Innovation units' scope to technology of that kind, it really helped us focus on technology. We could very quickly buy, purchase, and then pilot in military mission. Welcome to the Irregular Warfare Podcast. I'm your host, Frank Straczynski, and my co-host today is Matt Mullering. In today's episode,

we discuss the Defense Innovation Unit's inception as an organization, evolution over time, and its methods for integrating Silicon Valley technology within the Department of Defense. Our guests begin by outlining DIU's origin and mission emphasizing the importance of commercial technology in deterring and winning future conflicts. Our guests then discuss the challenges DIU faced with skepticism about the role of young companies in Silicon Valley and the bureaucratic problems associated with the DOD's current budgeting and acquisition processes. They then provide insight into DIU's core concept of operationalizing commercial technology faster than adversaries as a mean of

supporting the national defense strategy. Lastly, they discuss adversarial approaches to innovation and use examples from both historical and contemporary conflicts to highlight important lessons learned for policymakers and practitioners. Raj Shah is a serial technology entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and former director of the Pentagon's Defense Innovation Unit. He is currently the managing partner of Shield Capital, an investment firm focused on technologies at the nexus of commercial and national security applications. He started his career as an F-16 pilot in the Air National Guard and continues to serve part time.

He obtained an AB degree from Princeton University and an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania. Christopher Kirchhoff is an expert in emerging technology who helped create the Defense Innovation Unit and continues to advise. During the Obama administration, he was the Director of Strategic Planning for the National Security Council

and Senior Civilian Advisor to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Chris obtained an A.B. degree from Harvard College and a PhD in social and political science from Cambridge University. You are listening to the Irregular Warfare Podcast, a joint production of the Princeton empirical studies of conflict project and the Modern War Institute at West Point, dedicated to bridging the gap between scholars and practitioners to support the community of regular warfare professionals. Here's our conversation with Chris and Raj. Chris, Raj, welcome to the regular warfare podcast.

Great to be here. Thanks, Matt. Thanks for having us. So to start off, Chris, Raj, we found your book, Unit X, How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley are Transforming the Future of War, a very intriguing approach to innovation for modern warfare. So I'll go to you first, Chris, and then Raj, you can jump in. Can you provide some insight into your motivation and purpose for writing the book? Well, gosh, I guess, you know, we kind of lived an amazing story with Defense Innovation Unit having the chance to get the mission from Secretary Ash Carter back in 2016 to

come out here to Silicon Valley and try our best to build DIU up into an institution that could begin to draw Silicon Valley technology a lot closer to the military. The book begins with us getting the mission, us coming out to Silicon Valley. It goes all the way through actually the war in Ukraine and developments in the Middle East. We end the book not too long after the Hamas attack in Israel of October 7th. From my end, I think our greatest challenge of our generation is the protection and preservation of democracy over autocracy.

And commercial technology is now going to play a massive role in deterring, and God forbid, winning future conflicts. Things like AI and cyberspace are transforming things. And if you think back to 2016, when we, Chris and I took on this mission, it was not well understood or even believed that young companies in the Valley had a role to play. And I only use the Valley, I don't mean just Silicon Valley, but that mindset of young companies.

And now fast forward to today, eight years later, and DIU is part of the firmament, everyone knows what it is. And so for me, the motivation for writing the book was we had an amazing team, both inside DIU and entrepreneurs and founders we were working with. And we thought the story of how it came together, the battles we had to fight in the Pentagon, the opportunities that the team took advantage was important to tell, to give the context of how do you do

innovation in a large bureaucracy. And then, you know, given the fact that Chris and I have been seeing this for a decade, how is this going to interplay in the future to continue to harness innovation and preserve peace? Chris, the DOD apparatus of programs and activities is massive and complex. I think especially when you think about a regular warfare, which is what our audience usually discusses, and then you start talking about acquisitions, it can be difficult for members of our audience to really know what we're talking about and where DIU sits. So can you provide some context for how the Defense Innovation Unit got

started and its mission related to driving innovation for DoD? Yeah, for sure. I mean, the Department of Defense is such an interesting creature of an institution. You know, if you look at the org charts of most government agencies, they fit nicely on an 8.5 by 11 piece of paper, and you can see who's in charge and what the main parts are. And if anybody's ever seen the Department of Defense organizational chart, it's actually as big as a whiteboard. It's a poster. It's like three feet by four feet because you need that much real estate to actually list out all the moving parts of it. And so in the context of that large of an organization, when Ash Carter was secretary back in 2016, he started what really was a very small office.

I mean, we're talking about 40 people on Moffitt Field out here in Silicon Valley. And so at the time, it was almost a little bit like a demonstration project. And unusually for an office, it wasn't actually a part of really any of the large offices of the department. It wasn't a part of the acquisitions office or the research and engineering office. Secretary Carter actually attached DIU directly to his office, which was wholly unusual. But that's how it started.

And of course, it's evolved since then, organizationally in terms of where it sits. And it's also evolved in the organizations that have grown up alongside it as sort of sister and brother innovation organizations in different parts of the Department of Defense and at different parts of the military services. Thanks for that, Chris.

I think that provides some good perspective for the listeners that are maybe a little intimidated by all the programs and activities out there. For ROG, looking at the National Defense Strategy, it outlines three components, integrated deterrence, campaigns, and building enduring advantage as the means for achieving the nation's security goals. So where does the DIU fit in that picture in terms of accomplishing the priorities outlined in the National Defense Strategy?

You know, in the Defense Strategy, one of the words and phrases they use is pacing, the pacing threat, particularly in the Pacific. The role of DIU and other organizations like it in the building is how do we harness this amazing, rapid advancement of technology in the commercial world? If you look historically, the DOD and the government was the greatest funder of R&D in the Cold War and World War II previous. But in the late 80s, those lines crossed and now there's far more investment in the private sector. So it's really coming down to speed.

There are huge markets that the commercial companies are going after. They're making rapid advancements in technology. And I think that the unit or the country that's able to ingest, operationalize, employ that technology faster than their adversary will prevail. And that's the role of the Defense Innovation Unit was how do you move really fast and bring in non-traditional performers to support the national defense strategy and the national security strategy of the United States and its allies. I really like what you put there, Raj, is like you kind of talk about Silicon Valley and I think, you know, it's a story of it's definitely one of our innovation hubs, but

innovation has also kind of become a buzzword in the national security community. And usually it's meant like to justify budgets and getting people what they want. So Chris, we'll jump back over to you. So how do you view this concept of innovation, specifically what DIU was trying to do, which was really get at that intersection of technology, venture capital, and then the DOD. We started off wrestling with that question, exactly what did we mean by innovation? And the answer that we landed on is that in the constellation of other institutions that work on technology in the department, there are many, you know, Chris Starrpa is one, Sko was another. We at Defense Innovation Unit

wanted to really focus on where we were in the world, which is Silicon Valley. And we wanted to focus specifically on commercial technology that was more or less the phrase is out here, off the shelf. So technology that you could buy, you didn't really have to modify. It wasn't a science experiment per se. It wouldn't take bench lab work or engineering work to make function in a military mission. And by limiting defense innovation units scope to technology of that kind, it really helped us focus on technology that we could very quickly buy, purchase, and then pilot in military missions. And so if we ran across a piece of technology that was still experimental or that would require a lot of modification, that would take time, it would involve bench signs that D.I.U. didn't have,

that was not something that was going to be on our shopping list. That's, of course, one definition of innovation and one specific part of technology, but because of the exploding commercial technology market, it's a really important part of the overall innovation play that the department as a whole is making through DIU and through a number of the other organizations that are in the department. To jump over to you, Raj, on a similar line of questioning, we're talking about this concept of innovation. So, how does Silicon Valley contribute to advancing growth for the DOD

in this innovation space? I mean, so many different ways. It's probably no better time to be thinking about building a company working on national security than today. But if I were to look at how does the Silicon Valley mindset, and it's not just, you know, this region, but the broader innovation ecosystem. You know, one, of course, is just technology delivery. So, you want a great AI system, the large language models are built here. You want a flying car, they're built by companies based out here. So, there's countless, I think, technology areas that are used now for national security reasons. But I think more interestingly, it's contributing to a change in mindset in the Pentagon and

the government about just how fast things can be built. So the US government said, I want a communicator device that can have land nav, communication across multiple radios, storing imagery, data, and all these kinds of things. And you'd done that in 2001. You would have gone out to a traditional defense procurement process and about eight years later you would have got a brick that weighs like 20 pounds and costs $100,000. Where on the commercial side, we ended up with the iPhone and it happened because of that rapid iteration of

change, large customer basis and an iterative approach to how you do technology development. And so I think it's contributing to a change in mindset of how the department can build and field things. And now you're starting to see that with the rise of companies like Shield and Shield AI and Andrel and others, and of course, SpaceX. So there's a view of mindset shift in terms of speed,

and then also cost, right? That cost in and of itself is a force multiplier and new ways of approaching technology build and the software component of it can dramatically lower your costs and allow you to have a level of mass that you could not get with a traditional system. The story you just told, Raj, about how you look at software development, you look at what Silicon Valley did and how they were really able to scale and build quickly and kind of the rise of these new companies that you mentioned that are trying to do the same thing but now in defense. Where was the need for DIU, like where we kind of saw that like,

hey, we could actually tie the Silicon Valley culture to something different for DoD? Where did that idea come out of? And where was that progression from what you talked about from the original Ash Carter decision? How did that kind of evolve once they first set you guys up? So we dedicate the book to Ash Carter, right? This was his vision. And he was a prescient, unique leader. He'd actually wrote a paper in 2001 talking about how commercial technology will be vital to militaries and the battlefield of the future. Fast forward 15 years later, he's Secretary of Defense and he wants to make that a reality. You got to think back, it was quite different in 2016 and 2015 about the relationship between the Valley and the Pentagon.

You have the overhang of Snowden. There's immense amount of mistrust between those two groups. Venture capitalists looked at the defense acquisition process and said, boy, it's so slow and so skewed towards the incumbents that they would actually recommend their startups not to work in the defense area. My first startup was a cybersecurity business where my co-founders, I met them at the National Security Agency.

We were all government folks and we knew our tech would have been valuable to the government, but because it was so hard, our recommendation for our investors was to stay away. And so with that mistrust, both from a ethics as well as business standpoint, it was really hard for those two groups to come back. And that was the origination of DIU, right?

We were trying to bring these two very disparate worlds together. And so Secretary Carter had the vision, his team began to put it in place. Unfortunately, it got staffed in the lower levels of the Pentagon that really didn't have the innovation, understanding, and willingness to break glass to make it work in the valley. And so six months in, I think Secretary Carter made a very brave decision to say, look, the way we've been approaching defense innovation, experimental at the time, is not working and decided to put in a reboot. And that's where Chris and I got recruited to come in and revamp

the approach that DIU was taking with the Valley. And, you know, I think the core principle of that was delivering mission outcome. Let's find important technology. Let's get it into the hands of the warfighter and let's do it at a speed that's relevant for startups. And I'm proud to say that we helped rebuild that trust. And now if you walk down Sand Hill and Silicon Valley, there are tons and tons of startups trying to serve national security.

Investors are excited about it. I think this is great news for the United States and its allies and the defeat of autocracy. Every story has a beginning, middle, and end, and I think you captured that in a small amount of space for what that story is for DIU. For this next question, I think it's good for both of you, but I'll go to Raj first. So the planning, programming, budgeting, and execution process, also known as PPBE for the DoD, has come under a lot of scrutiny as an outdated methodology that is not necessarily suitable for the requirements of strategic competition in the modern era.

So how do you view the current DoD's budgeting process and its ability to generate the capabilities required for the modern battlefield? Well, there was recently a commission on reforming the PPBE process I served as one of the commissioners on that committee for two years and I'll say I got equal measure of Controversies and congratulations when I was named to it. But look, I think there's some real interest in making reform and understanding that our current budget system is a great one, but it was designed for an era that is no longer here. It was designed for when the DOD was the monopsony buyer right there, the big buyer, and there were just a few firms to go to.

And today, the world buyer, and there were just a few firms to go to. And today, the world is very, very different. And so there's a whole range of areas of reform that have been proposed that Congress is getting excited about, that the department's getting excited about. And number one is aligning budgets to strategy, right? If you look at what our senior leaders talk about, we talk about innovation, artificial intelligence. They're really, really important things, and they're the right ones.

But then if you look at our budget, it doesn't match that. Number one is how do you align those two? We recommended a range of things to include replacing the PPB process with something new, that we call the Defense Resourcing System, doing continuing planning and analysis, etc. Second one, of course, that we call the defense resourcing system, doing continuing planning and analysis, et cetera. The second one, of course, that we focused on was innovation.

So how do you foster innovation and adaptability? One specific item there is removing this thing called colors of money, particularly for software. How do you make it easy to build and continue to update your software? Thirdly is trust, relationships between DoD and Congress. We need both branches of government to work together. The fourth one was around business systems, data analytics. It's a really big budget. How do we make sure we're getting the maximum efficiency? And then fifth, of course, is the workforce to support that. So I think there's great momentum for reform, and I'm excited that these will get implemented

in the coming year and two. Chris, bringing you back into the conversation. So tying the budget process to our primary pacing threat, the National Security Strategy Alliance, the PRC is our number one pacing threat with Russia's secondary, the acute threat. How do our adversaries approach innovation differ from the current US approach?

Before DIU was created, there were a number of senior leaders that came out from the Pentagon to take a look at what was happening in the Valley and visited with venture capital firms and went to Google and Facebook and met with entrepreneurs. And one of the people that went out was then City Vice Chairman, Admiral Sandy Winifold. And I was at that time working on the joint staff for the chairman. And I went with him as kind of his tour guide. And we had an amazing trip. It was just wonderful to be wandering around and imagining what sort of bridge we could potentially build with the valley. And that trip, along with a number of others, are in part what led to the momentum that generated the idea that became DIU.

And on the last day of that trip, we were getting in the motorcade at our hotel. And the day before Xi Jinping announced in a speech in China, and this was covered in the early bird, the news clips that everybody in the E-read reads every morning, he had announced a new policy called civil-military fusion. And that policy is, of course, now more widely known. But in that policy, Xi Jinping said it's very important for the People's Liberation Army to have access to the very best technology that's being produced in China. And for that reason, we're going to make sure that any startup or technology company in China is going to expose its technology to the PLA. We may even put PLA members or members of the Communist Party on boards or in the executive staff of companies. And we're going to try and create a sort of frictionless ability to transfer technology

into the military. So I got in the car with Admiral Winnefeld and he looks at me and says, here we are just beginning to have conversations here in Silicon Valley. And Xi Jinping has from the top down, directed by Edict, the free flow of technology from startups into the military. Now, the Chinese system is different and there's a lot of reasons why I think we can all be confident that the US innovation system is stronger in the longer term. But it does paint quite a different picture for how technology will flow to the Chinese military. And certainly in 2016, that was a step that

placed China in a much more dominant position than the US was with the heart of its own innovation economy here in the nation. And that's something that we talk quite a bit about in the book and that's something also that Raj has worked on a lot after he left Defense Innovation Union by starting Shield Capital, a firm that's designed to bring together much closer the hottest parts of the innovation economy in the country with firms working on national security. Chris, thanks for that. I think the understanding those adversarial approaches things, it can provide some lessons learned but also some context for how the US should approach things in the future.

So, Taraj going to another area of operation into Europe. So we're currently in the third year of conflict between Russia and Ukraine. We've seen how the Ukrainians have utilized small UAS platforms to target both Russian military and civilian infrastructure. So what role has innovation played in Russia's approach to the conflict and their preparation for future conflicts? That's a fascinating set of circumstances is occurring in Ukraine. It's giving us a glimpse into the future.

Chris and I had the opportunity to travel to Ukraine last fall, along with some of our NATO colleagues. We got to visit several of the drone technology factories there on the ground. The speed at which they are innovating, because it is life and death literally for them, is absolutely remarkable. The pace of change of drone warfare, the incorporation of electronic warfare is measured in a matter of days and hours, not weeks, months or years. And I think it's truly transforming traditional concepts of how survivable is a main battle

tank and how should it be employed? How do you protect troops and troops movements? And I think these are lessons that I hope the US and other allied nations are heeding and are ones that we want to understand and be ahead of adversaries. So if I think back to our DIU times, one of the things that we worked on was something called Rogue Squadron, which was an attempt to, again, take commercially developed drones and capabilities and how do you best apply them to military purposes? More importantly, how do you take foreign-made commercial drugs, at that time, DJI, and change

the software so you could use them and not have your information leave your own country, your own area? Because at the time, our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan were taking DJI drones into the battlefield that they brought on their own because there was no alternative. There was no American supplier. And so DIU, along with some of its partners in the army, were able to quickly create a software solution that made those drones usable. So I think we're just at the early innings of a massive change and we're watching it

in front of our eyes because it's one of the first wars being played out on social media. I once read a short history of the Boer War, which is important because it's the first time that the Gatling gun is used. And there were some foreign military observers there who put the dots together and realized that the introduction of the Gatling gun had fundamentally changed warfare and that in particular, cavalry would no longer be a viable and effective force if Gatling guns were to be widely deployed. And I feel like we're at a similar moment in both Ukraine and Israel. And I'll just share a couple examples. In May, the US requested the Ukrainians pull back all 31 of the M1 Abrams tanks that we had provided the Ukrainian military from the front, because I think seven of them had been destroyed by Russian kamikaze drones.

It's remarkable, right? I mean, this is the most advanced tank in the world, and cheap Russian drones can kill it. That tells me, are we at the end of a century of mechanized warfare? I mean, the tank first came of age in the First World War, you know, 100 years ago. And here we are at this incredible moment in the history of war where things are changing all over again. And you see similar developments happening I think at a quite rapid pace in the Middle East. You know, on October 7th, how did Hamas actually come over that incredibly sophisticated Gaza border wall? One of the things they did is they strapped grenades to quadcopters, and they dropped them on the generators

that were powering the Israeli communication towers on the border. Another thing going on now in northern Israel that's really quite remarkable and perhaps not talked about enough is that Hezbollah is using a combination of cruise missiles, drones, and also actually loitering munitions.

Insufficient numbers that Israel has actually evacuated its population from the first 10 kilometers of its territory in the North, which means that 85,000 people have had to leave their homes. And it's not impossible to imagine a scenario where Hezbollah will intensify those attacks and Israel may actually have to pull more population away from its northern border. those attacks and Israel may actually have to pull more population away from its northern border. This is just remarkable that inexpensive lawyering munitions and drones are having this effect against an extremely advanced military. At the same time, there was a report just a couple of weeks ago of Houthi rebels in

the Red Sea who have been quite successfully disrupting not only commercial shipping, where 12% of the world's shipping passes through the Red Sea, but also actually getting very close to some of our defenses. I mean, there are reports that some Huthi weapons got within a mile of the USS Gravli, a destroyer that actually had to use its own Gatling gun to defend itself, its last line of defense. And just two weeks ago, it seems that the Huthis have begun employing autonomous sea drones to attack shipping. So in a way, we're seeing potentially the kind of Ukraine playbook, the playbook that the Ukrainians used with commercial technology to stop a much larger, more dominant military force from invading their own

country, now flipped on its head and being used against our forces in the Red Sea and against Israeli forces, both along the Gaza border and particularly in the north of Israel. And I think that's just remarkable. It speaks to the moment that we're in. Yeah. Thanks for both those perspectives. And with really important historical and contemporary examples of innovation and warfare, I just want to stay on this topic, reach a little bit further on what's even feasible in the DOD. Are there any things you think DIU can leverage to bridge this gap on lessons learned from either Ukraine or Israel and how they're adapting to their conflicts? Or do you think this is just one of those things that it's going to take a real long

time for DoD to change the way they integrate software and new technology? One of the things that I am most proud of that we did at DIU is we prove that you can move fast. The DOD can move quickly given the right set of incentives. We were doing contract actions in less than 90 days from meeting a company, doing a competitive selection and putting them under a contract to deliver technology. I think at the heart of that is just an amazing team that is mission focused. So when we first arrived,

the DIU-X at the time had not written a contract. And so there was, in our first week, where Chris and I and the team were meeting the existing team, which was about 10 people. We were very focused on how do we accelerate this vision that Secretary Carter had given us of actually procuring things. And in meeting the team, we met an amazing young woman named Lauren Daly. Her family had a military background, her father had served in the army, and she was

an army civilian acquisition core person. And she had taken the time to read, I guess it would have been the 2015 NDAA, and had discovered that Congress had given the department the authority to do a new type of other transaction authority, which she named CSO, Commercial Solutions Opening. And she basically said to us, hey, I think there's a way for us to do contracting really quickly and use this new authority. And so we said, well, that's really interesting. Can you do some analysis and maybe write a paper about it? She said, well, funny you ask, I've already done that. Handed us basically a 40 page blueprint on how to do OTAs

very quickly. And then Chris took that paper, went to the general council at DOD, and basically got approval for us to use this new authority that Congress had given the department that no one had used. And so I think to us, it shows that even in a large bureaucracy, right, the Pentagon's the world's largest organization,

three million people, that an individual that's motivated, creative, can make a real difference. And so we built upon Lauren's idea and innovation and that has continued to power what DIU does for contract speed and now across the department in whole. So I'm very bullish on the change that I'm seeing across the department to focus on quickly innovating and getting speed up. There's still much to do, but it's again a very different place than it was a decade ago.

And you know, just to put a number on what a single person was able to do in the department, the method that she formalized in the commercial solutions opening has now been used to purchase $70 billion worth of technology since 2016. That is not a small amount of change. And so at DIU, we were able to come up with a method that not only we could use, but anybody in the department could use. And we made it a priority of ours that first year to write a how-to guide.

We actually put it up on our website so anybody could download it. Because we knew that part of our mission wasn't just to ourselves pilot technology. It was to come up with a process that could be generalized that anybody could use because we were ultimately only a small part of the department. But if we get others using that same process, get others interested in acquiring commercial technology in the same way, then we could have a much larger effect on the department.

I think that narrative leads well into this next question. I wanted to talk about this distinction between innovation and adaptation and warfare. We've discussed a couple of examples such as Hamas using drones with grenades and Ukrainian use of loitering munitions. So the question comes down to who owns the development of technological innovation? Is it a bottom-ups approach, top-down approach, or is it really a kind of hybrid in which both are constantly interacting to create or adapt new capabilities for the battlefield. You know, the department is, it's so large and it has, of course, many different entities working on technology, working on inventing new ways of both fighting a new technology

to fight with. And in a lot of respects, the department, at least at a policy level, has described its approach to technology development and technology acquisition as a kind of portfolio approach in the sense that a lot of places in the department aren't actually focused on making leaps with technology. They're instead focused on making incremental progress. Incremental progress is not as risky. You tend not to fail as much, but if you keep cranking away, you do eventually get somewhere. And then there are other places like DARPA, whose entire mission is to take the boldest bets to,

in DARPA's mission statement, create strategic surprise. And so that's an example of a complementary approach, actually, to the sort of incremental approach. Where defense innovation comes in is, I think, DIU started, in many respects, as very much a bottom-up approach in that when Raj and I arrived, we had very little money, Congress had yet to appropriate really much of a budget. And so we were dependent upon who was interested in working with us.

And what that meant in practice is people who came with budget to spend and a good idea of how to spend it were the people that we ended up working with. It very much was a bottoms up approach. What we're seeing now, almost 10 years later, is that bottoms up approach to project driven innovation that involves individual services and individual components of services coming out to DIU, partnering with DIU to experiment on very specific things. We're starting, I think, to see that meet up with a top-down approach, in the sense that under Secretary Austin's leadership and under Kath Hicks leadership, you now have DIU's third director, Doug Beck, who's been empowered to play a different role

at DIU than Raj and I played and then Mike Brown, the director between Raj and I and Doug played, where the director of DIU serves simultaneously as the person who's running DIU, but also the main innovation advisor to the secretary, and is there to help provide some strategic points of view on technology, strategic points of view that will feed into, among other things, the national defense strategy and the budget plans at the services. So I think the ultimate goal that I think we're all striving for is to make sure that people actually attacking specific problems are able to experiment,

but then also coming up with some larger strategic directions for the department. So the bottom is up approach meets the top down approach. Dr. Ben Houdini Yeah, I would agree with Chris. It's both sides. And in fact, Deputy Secretary Bob Work, who was very involved, effectively named DIUX in its origination, would say the department doesn't have an innovation problem. It has an innovation adoption problem, right? If you go out to the front lines, our troops are the most innovative folks in the world. They will take whatever kit and gear they have and go off to their no-fail mission with amazing creativity. It's going back into the bureaucracy that things get slugged down and slowed down.

And now, you know, I think the right answer is that the bottoms-up innovation that it started with is now married with a top-down strategy with a just relentless focus on how do we never have a fair fight and because of that, how do we deter a conflict? So I think everyone has a role to play. And I used to say, maybe I don't say it anymore, was that if DIUX had done its job really, really well, you wouldn't even need the unit at all. Right? Like innovation should not be something separate from the mainline acquisition and mainline operations development.

Given how large of the Pentagon is, I think we still need these organizations. And Doug and team are carrying the flame. But everyone has a responsibility to move the ball forward. I think for the listeners who probably aren't as familiar with some of the acquisition processes and acronyms, I think one thing that can really help tie just how incredible the success DIU has had is, is there any examples of a specific

project that either you guys were part of or DIU is doing now that you'd like to highlight? I can tell a story about how we helped the department understand the importance of software and the speed of software. So this would have been 2017, no 2016, I had the opportunity to travel to Qatar with the Defense Innovation Board to visit something called the CAOC, the Combined Air Operations Center. Basically where all the war from the aerial side

was being run out of for Iraq and Afghanistan. And it literally did not look any different than when I was in uniform a decade prior. The only real innovation was maybe they had a newer version of Microsoft Excel. And as we were taking a tour of the facility, one of the things we saw was the cell that planned how air refueling tankers provided gas to fighters and other airplanes. And it was done on a whiteboard with magnetic pucks and three guys on three different computers, you know, one guy calculating fuels, the other guy calculating

routes and manually figuring out the plan for the next day. And every 24 hours you need a new plan to go out to the squadrons. It was like 40 man hours per day to do this. And we said, boy, this is like a traveling salesman problem and we can solve this. So we were there with the Division Board and Eric Schmidt and said, okay, this is a problem that we can go and tackle. And so I called back to then Colonel Enrique Odi, who was with us at DIU and said,

I know you've been looking for a great way to show reform in networks. And I kept, we have our plan. Let's find a way to modernize the tanker planning program. And so immediately he began to work on it. He found three Air Force engineers and three engineers from a commercial company in Silicon Valley that had long hair. We got them 24 hours, secret conferences and put them on a plane to Qatar.

They brought in the first ever Macintoshes into that facility and had to get special dispensation but no good coder was going to code on a Windows 95 machine. And within six weeks, they had built a working prototype where the system would map out where the refueler should be and would take 30 seconds to do that and then the team would spend an hour to quality control it. And this became important because we discovered that because there was so much troops in contact situations going on, right, the bad guys began shooting at the good guys, that they would have to scramble fighters overhead.

And when you did that, the plan would have to change. They couldn't reform it. So then they would scramble fighters overhead. And when you did that, the plan would have to change. They couldn't reform it. So then they would scramble tankers. And we had tankers sitting at all these bases around the region. And because of the new software, they could on real time recalculate all the flows and the plan and not have to scramble tankers.

And so we discovered that after they implemented the system, save about three scrambles a day, each scramble costs $250,000, not even including the wear and tear on the airplanes. And so the whole tool paid for itself in about four days. That sounds great. And it was. It was still a very small part of the war. But what happened was a staffer from McCain's office then came by and observed the system and was impressed. The commander of the time, General Prigian, was very proud and supportive.

But the Air Force then, at the time, the program office had said, hey, this is really great innovation, but we're gonna take it under advisement and put it back into our main program of reform. We're only 10 years into it. We're gonna get the next release in two years. This whole program took six weeks.

And General Prigian said, absolutely not. Once you get a new program, you can take away two years. This whole program took six weeks. And General Regan said, absolutely not. Once you get a new program, you can take away this one. We're using it in combat. And so at that same time, the Air Force was asking for additional funding because it was all late and overdue. And John McCain and his staff basically said, no. I want you to turn off this over budget, underperforming

program to reform the CAOC and take this approach that DIU had done. And that was the birth of something called Castle Run, which is the first software factory in the military. In fact, Enrique Odi became the first commander of that. And they went on to build other apps. And so it's a really long story. But what I think it showed the department was, hey, software is really important.

It can move very fast. And you don't need large teams. And it has a really outside leverage impact on war. And I think what it did was for the senior leadership, give them appreciation for what I think the younger members of the military knew every day, which was, you're in your barracks, you're using your iPhone and your laptop to talk to friends and play games. Then you go to work and you're going back to the 1980s to understand how computing worked back then because if your systems were so archaic, it doesn't have to be that way. And so that's one of the things that I think we're most proud of is to, again, of course,

the actual tech was important in the delivery of that solution. But really to show a vision, boy, there's been a massive change in products and technology and we as the Department of Defense need to adapt to harness that. And I think we're seeing those fruits today. That's a perfect segue for us to wrap up and close with some key takeaways for our audience.

This last question is for both of you, but I will direct it to Chris first. So based on today's conversation, what are the major considerations for policymakers, academics, and practitioners who are interested in the application of innovation in a regular warfare? Well, I'll go back to Ukraine, which is just so striking on so many levels. There's just so many things happening in Ukraine.

Again, it calls to mind the Boer War and what the Boer War foreshadowed to come. And I'll go back to the example we talked a little bit about before, the M1A1 Abrams tank being withdrawn from the front line. I mean, if the arsenal of democracy, if the United States and its allies with our tremendous military and industrial capabilities have militaries that are made up of a lot of tanks and things like them, that all of a sudden are not performing very well on a battlefield full of radically innovative commercial technology. That worries me.

That really worries me because it tells me that we've made tremendous investments into things that might have overnight gone from very successful, powerful weapons systems into sunk costs, into museum pieces, perhaps even. And so I guess my main policy message, looking at first where Defense Innovation Unit started as a small little thing, and now the world that we're encountering, places like Ukraine and Israel and the Red Sea, I think it hopefully should wake everybody up and make everybody realize that we really are experiencing this hybrid moment in war where there are going to be older weapon systems that are still tremendously important, artillery, tactical air, but they're going to be fighting

alongside a whole new world of weapon systems that are new, that are built out of technology that doesn't come from companies that focus just on the defense market. So I suppose that would be my biggest takeaway for policymakers, that we seem to be approaching a moment that is more or less equivalent to the Boer War and military history, or perhaps the inner warriors between World War I and World War II. I mean, there's a wonderful historical resonance in DIU

being located on Moffett Field in Mountain View, California, named for Admiral Moffat, who was the pioneer in the Navy, who understood before others that it was going to be carriers that were important in the next war, not battleships, that carriers were going to actually have the ability to defeat battleships. And not to dramatize it too much, but had we not understood that as a Navy and prepared for that, you have to wonder whether we would still be speaking English in the United States or whether we would still be speaking English in the United States or whether we might have lost the Second World War. So I think it's just wonderful that there's a group of people now at Defense Innovation Unit with now a billion

dollar budget, a much larger budget than Raj and I had when we were there that are confronting these questions head on. Very well said. And I think the other analogy to take from those interwar periods with both what Admiral Moffat did and General Arnold did at the time was taking risk, the willingness to move fast and try new things. And I think that's what I would leave with your listeners is that the advance of technology is just accelerating. And that acceleration is also lowering the costs. And so when we're thinking about software applications

and new strategies and even low cost drones, it's okay to try something, discover it doesn't work and pivot to something new. It's a different mindset than building an aircraft carrier or a fifth-gen fighter where you don't have as much room to maneuver. And so I really think that speed and cost are qualities that will eventually be on par with mass and power. Chris Raj, just want to say thanks again for joining us on the Irregular Warfare Podcast.

I think the audience will really love the conversation. As you both pointed with examples, whether from the US or looking at the Russian-Ukraine conflict or Israel-Hamas, we're seeing these come to fruition in real time. And that's something that policymakers and practitioners need to understand and apply for the future. So thanks again. Thanks for having us on here. It's been great. Yeah. Thanks very much. And thanks again. Thanks for having us on here. It's been great.

Thanks very much and thanks for taking an interest in UNITEX. Thank you again for joining us on the Irregular Warfare Podcast. We release a new episode every two weeks. Our next episode will examine the challenges of climate change and the impact on Irregular Warfare. Be sure to subscribe to the Irregular Warfare Podcast so you don't miss an episode. The podcast is a product of the Regular Warfare Initiative. We are a team of all volunteer practitioners and researchers dedicated to bridging the gap between scholars and practitioners to support the community of regular warfare professionals. You can follow and engage with

us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, or LinkedIn. You can also subscribe to our monthly e-newsletter for access to our content and upcoming community events. The newsletter signup is found at irregularwarfare.org. If you enjoyed today's episode, please leave a comment and positive rating on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to the Regular Warfare Podcast. It really helps expose the show to new listeners. And one last note, what you hear in this episode are the views of the participants and do not represent those at Princeton, West Point or any agency in the U.S. government. Thanks again, and we'll see you next time.