The U.S. Military Might Be More Like Russia's Military Than You Think

War on the Rocks

News, Politics

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 12 May 2022

⏱️ 19 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Did that title get your attention? It got Ryan's attention too when it came out of Steve Blank's mouth. If you're a War on the Rocks reader/listener, you've probably heard of him before. A successful entrepreneur, businessman, and veteran, Steve was one of the key architects of Hacking for Defense and, most recently, the Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation. And he is decidedly not optimistic about the state of U.S. defense innovation. In fact, he worries that the Defense Department's inability to innovate quickly and at scale might lead to defeat in a war against China.

What about all these new entrants into the defense marketplace? Can the U.S. Defense Department be reformed before a catastrophe? And what are the stakes? Our guest answers these questions and more. And don't miss his tour de force presentation, "The Secret History of Silicon Valley."

Transcript

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0:00.0	You are listening to the War in the Rocks podcast on Strategy Defense and Foreign Affairs.
0:15.6	My name is Ryan Evans.
0:16.7	I had a chance to sit down with Steve Blank, the noted innovator and leader here at Stanford
0:21.0	University where I popped in for a visit.
0:23.0	Steve is one of the founders of the hacking for defense movement as well as the lean startup movement.
0:27.0	And he's the author of the Four Steps to the Epiphany and the startup owner manual.
0:30.0	He's a big player in the world of defense innovation, and in our conversation
0:34.5	it came across that Steve is, you know, not quite optimistic, not quite pessimistic, but definitely
0:40.4	not optimistic about the state of defense innovation.
0:43.4	Let's hear what he has to say.
0:45.4	We're recording this just in the middle of the war in Ukraine and I think we have an on
0:51.2	the battlefield experiment of what happens when a 20th century industrial age military meets a 21st century agile, you know, distributed using commercial technology army and I think the results for the 20th century have just
1:04.4	come in there on the bottom of the Black Sea and and there are smoking ruins on
1:08.4	on the roads to Kiev and I'm afraid that you know the DOD looks a lot closer to Russia's
1:16.0	army than it does to the Ukraine. That is something that some friends of
1:19.7	mine have brought up quietly we just had an article by Con Crane about
1:22.3	they ought to be a lot louder about it. We might be more like Russia than we think
1:26.0	in terms of our ability to sustain a major war that's something that you worry about too.
1:29.8	Sure I mean you know we haven't the state of corruption in Russia, I think, you know, somebody estimated half to three quarters of the money are in apartments in London rather than weapons in the Ukraine.
1:43.0	But I still think the whole nature of Cold War infrastructure,
1:49.0	you know, the whole thing that said you had 30 year life cycles of technology that you could predict not only the technology but the threats that their armies and ours and our Defense Department owned all the technology to deter and win a war.
2:05.0	All those assumptions are gone.
	...

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