Lawfare Daily: Christopher Kirchhoff on How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley Are Transforming the Future of War
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 9 July 2024
⏱️ 59 minutes
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Summary
Jack Goldsmith sat down with Christopher Kirchhoff, a former senior official in the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) and the co-author with Raj Shah of the new book, “Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley Are Transforming the Future of War.”
They talked about the origins and aims of the Defense Innovation Unit, how the defense bureaucracy fought it, and DIU’s successes and failures. They also discussed the pathologies of defense procurement, the relationship between technological innovation and military superiority, and whether the Department of Defense can innovate fast enough to maintain technological and military superiority.
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Transcript
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| 0:27.0 | Problem, however, is the long lags that have grown up in defense production |
| 0:36.2 | and just leave this gap between the technology that was baked into the design and what is current at the time. |
| 0:43.7 | And so you end up with this somewhat absurd situation |
| 0:46.8 | where a $700 million fighter takes off in 2016 |
| 0:51.6 | with a processor in it that's slower than what we're all carrying around in our pocket. |
| 0:57.0 | It's the Law Fair podcast. I'm Jack Goldsmith from Harvard Law School with Christopher Kirkoff, |
| 1:02.9 | a former senior official in the Pentagon's |
| 1:04.8 | Defense Innovation Unit. |
| 1:07.5 | Our goals, first of all, were to prove |
| 1:10.5 | that commercial technology was viable in military missions that actually on the battlefield |
| 1:16.1 | you could take commercial technology directly from the shelf and it could be effective. |
| 1:21.8 | We're talking about Kirikoff's new book with Raj Shah |
| 1:26.0 | called Unit X, how the Pentagon and Silicon Valley are transforming the future of war. |
| 1:32.0 | Chris, the name of your new book with Raj Shaw is Unit X, |
| 1:37.0 | How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley are transforming the future of war. |
| 1:42.0 | And Unit X is, I guess, a nickname for the Defense Innovation Unit |
| 1:46.7 | where you used to work and what the book is about. |
| 1:50.0 | So why don't you start off by telling us what the Defense Innovation Unit is? |
... |
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