Welcome to the President's Inbox, a CFR podcast about the foreign policy challenges facing the United States.

I'm Jim Lindsay, Director's Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

This week's topic is Silicon Valley and the future of warfare.

With me to discuss the efforts by the U.S. Defense Department to incorporate cutting-edge technology into U.S. military readiness are Raj M. Shah and Christopher Kirchoff.

Raj is currently the managing partner of Shield Capital, which invests in technologies at the nexus of commercial and national security applications. He was the former managing

director of the Pentagon's Defense Innovation Unit. Chris is an expert in emerging technology.

He held several positions in the Obama administration, including senior

civilian aid to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Raj and Chris are the authors of the new book

Unit X, How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley are transforming the future of war.

Raj and Chris, thank you very much for joining me.

Great to be here, James.

Raj, if I may, I want to begin with you. You and Chris both worked at and ran the Defense Innovation

Unit X, as it went by in the short form, what exactly was it?

James, the purpose of the Defense Innovation Unit, and we had been called experimental at the time,

was to really mend the ties between the Pentagon and Silicon Valley and places like Silicon Valley of innovation, from both a contractual

and cultural standpoint.

Secretary Carter, who asked Chris and I to take on this job alongside two of our other partners,

had been a visionary.

In 2001, he had written a paper at Harvard stating how important commercial technology will be or would be to deter and prevail in conflict.

And unfortunately, these two worlds had really diverged over the last few decades.

So he built this office and put us in charge to say, how do we get innovation into the hands of warfighters?

So let me ask you, Chris, as we look at this, why is it that that had become a challenge?

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