Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley Are Transforming the Future of War

Wavell Room Audio Reads

If the war against Ukraine has highlighted any truth, it is that the defense industrial bases of the United States and Europe are woefully underequipped for the demands of high-intensity conventional warfare. The United States was and remains the only country that retained the kinds of stockpiles necessary to support Ukraine's defense and future offense, and it faces competing demands for those declining inventories.
Yet, for a country with a nearly $900 billion budget, it seems unable to get what it needs, when it needs it, and at a scale necessary for what it anticipates as future conflicts, not the least of which is with China over Taiwan.
The issue is, fundamentally, one of acquisition and procurement. The speed and urgency that drives the bureaucracy of the Department of Defense has not kept pace with the speed of innovation that drives Silicon Valley. In the age of the iPhone the Pentagon is using the Blackberry, at best (and not a late generation one, at that). There are shoots of growth through the concrete of the military's purchasing systems.
Groups like the Defense Innovation Unit (; formerly known as the Defense Innovation Unit - Experimental or DIUx) have sought to bridge the gap between Washington and Silicon Valley. Authors Raj M. Shah and Christopher Kirchhoff, the former director of DIU and a driver of its creation, respectively, recount the creation of the Unit, its struggles, and its successes in the aptly titled book "".
It would seem to be a tall order, make Pentagon acquisition a thrilling read, but Shah and Kirchhoff manage to pull it off and rather well.
Filled with anecdotes of how the supposedly technologically cutting-edge services of the American armed forces operated in a surprisingly analogue manner, the authors tell the story of how DIU and others sought to match the warfighters' needs with Silicon Valley's innovations."Unit X" rightly focuses on the challenges of rapid innovation and rapid ingestion of new technologies. This is something for which the Pentagon, as the authors demonstrate, is not designed.
"Unit X" is not a story of nifty new technologies alone. It is really about the challenge of how the United States stays ahead of China, the pacing threat in strategic competition. Here, the Chinese Communist Party enjoys considerable competitive systemic advantages. A vertically integrated authoritarian-capitalist system, Beijing can better direct resources - human or capital - with rapid efficiency and arguably fewer bureaucratic hurdles.
China's aggressive corporate and military espionage campaigns have allowed it to leapfrog generations of innovation and trial and error. More alarmingly, the gap between theft and indigenous innovation is rapidly closing, with China able to develop more novel, domestic technologies at a greater rate than once anticipated.
The authors close "Unit X" by focusing on Ukraine (as is de rigueur today), which for many is seen as the standard-bearer for technological innovation, testing, and deployment. Senior military leaders on both sides of the Atlantic look to Ukraine wistfully, as a model of how they wish they could innovate and ingest new technologies - they want the war-time acquisition system without the war. That last part is key - in the absence of a clear driver of change, change is not forthcoming.
The problem is Ukraine is not the model they often think it is - that rapid adoption of new technologies is by consequence, not design. Those impressive and haunting first-person-video drones are used at such rates due to insufficient quantities of conventional artillery (which the United States and Europe are still failing to deliver). Those drone videos are also only the successful strikes.
The ratio of failure to success decidedly favors the former over the latter, especially as Russian electronic warfare improves. Ukraine's naval successes are deeply impressive, but miss key that when included make the lessons of the Black Sea unapplicable to other thea...