The email arrived at 6:04 a.m. on a Tuesday in October 2022, sent from Ash Carter’s personal account: “It is with deep and profound sadness that the family of former Secretary of Defense Ashton B. Carter shares that Secretary Carter passed away Monday evening in Boston after a sudden cardiac event.”
The grief was immediate and overwhelming. Carter was only sixty-eight years old, seemingly in good health. Raj had spoken with Carter early the day he died, about a potential startup investment. Ylli Bajraktari had a call scheduled with Carter to discuss a fellowship program on technology and geopolitics just hours after we all got the same terrible note. Chris was to have seen Carter four days later at Harvard, where Carter was teaching. Still reeling from the news, Chris walked up alone to Carter’s office on the third floor of the Kennedy School. Instead of hearing his trademark “Hey there brother,” there was silence. The lights were off. Tribute notes and flowers were piled on either side of the door.
On a cold January day ten weeks later, official Washington gathered to lay him to rest. The service was held in the cavernous National Cathedral. Carter would have liked that the sun was shining through a stained-glass window holding a moon rock, enshrined there by the crew of Apollo 11. The service was a time and a place where everyone who believed in the future Ash had envisioned came together once again. President Biden gave the eulogy. The Secretaries of State and Defense also spoke. The entire Joint Chiefs of Staff sat in a pew.
Carter was the second of two giants to fall. Madeleine Albright’s funeral at the cathedral had happened nine months before.
With so many of Washington’s leaders gathering to pay their respects, the Secret Service established a perimeter and attendees were advised to arrive two hours beforehand. After clearing security, Chris was handed a green card, one of seven colors the Protocol Office had printed. This being Washington, seating was carefully choreographed. Green was the section for Carter’s personal staff. It was the section closest to the pulpit, in the cathedral’s north eave. Chris sat with Ylli and Eric Schmidt. Doug Beck sat two rows away. Eric Rosenbach was also there, Carter’s chief of staff who’d negotiated our terms when we were signing on to DIU back in 2016.
There were a few “only in Washington” moments as everyone milled about before the service. Chris ran into the President of the Council on Foreign Relations in the men’s bathroom. One former Pentagon staffer who’d gone on to lobby for a defense prime stood near the entrance glad-handing people and passing out business cards. As if to say, “I’m more patriotic than you,” he wore an American flag pin on his lapel—only it was askew, a full ninety degrees sideways.
Todd Park, the former U.S. chief technology officer who in 2016 had told Carter that version 1.0 of DIUx was screwed and needed new leadership, was crying profusely. “Chris,” he said, “what would Ash Carter want us to be doing right now? He would want us to carry on the mission he gave us. There’s more work to do.” Todd had watched DIU’s struggle to win attention in the Pentagon, and he now wanted to help reboot it again.
With the United States Marine Orchestra joining the cathedral’s organist and choir, Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” rang out along with “America the Beautiful.” A full military honor guard stood at the ready. With spit-shined shoes and immaculate precision, they carried the urn containing Carter’s cremated remains down the aisle. The blue battle flag of the Secretary of Defense followed.
Biden stepped up to the pulpit and gave a stirring eulogy. No stranger to grief, his words helped explain why Ash’s loss was especially piercing. “I have some idea how hard this is, how unreal and unfair it seems,” Biden said. “To lose someone you love so suddenly, someone who should have had so many years ahead of them. The suddenness, in my view, magnifies the grief. It makes it just inescapable.”
He went on to talk about his relationship with Carter, and to sum up the man’s life. “Over the course of four decades, working in and out of the Pentagon, walking miles and miles of laps, Ash made an impact felt far into the future.”
For Biden, it was personal. In 2007 he’d led the fight on the Senate floor to fund the production of mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles—the MRAPs so badly needed by our troops facing improvised explosive devices in Iraq and Afghanistan. MRAPs had protected Biden’s own son Beau, who’d deployed to Iraq. It was Ash who’d accelerated their production, ultimately helping to deploy twenty-four thousand of them. Biden recalled a photo Ash had sent him: “Four feet long and maybe a foot high, the photograph was of MRAPs lined up side by side. The picture had a note saying, ‘Thanks. Ash Carter.’ I have it hanging in my office at home. His integrity—it was indomitable. Never had to wonder whether there was an edge to it, whether there was a secondary motive I didn’t see. And he literally saved, I think, in consequence of it, hundreds and hundreds, thousands of lives and limbs.”
There was one lighthearted moment when Biden referenced Carter’s legendary impatience. Biden turned to deliver the line to the green card section, where Carter’s staff sat. “He believed not just in getting things done but getting things done in record time, which I’m sure those who worked for him found very interesting sometimes.” The green section erupted with chuckles, and Biden nodded at the reaction. “I got a lot of laughter on this side,” he told the rest of the cathedral. It was Biden’s way of saluting those who’d helped make Carter’s many visions real.
“Each of us here today, and generations of national security leaders, decades of eager and brilliant students, the entire Armed Forces of the United States of America—we all will forever bear the imprint of Ash Carter, thank God,” Biden said.
Two weeks after the funeral, Chris delivered a blistering paper at a private conference at Stanford. The Hoover Institution spent considerable resources commissioning research and flying in key players. Raj spoke, along with Secretaries of Defense Jim Mattis and Leon Panetta; Mike Mullen, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs; and Congressman Mac Thornberry, who’d led the House Armed Services Committee. Chris’s paper was a lament, dedicated to Carter and written in anger. It was titled “A Requiem for Defense Innovation? Ukraine, the Pentagon’s Innovator’s Dilemma, and Why the U.S. Risks Strategic Surprise.”
The conference organizer had asked him to tone it down.
Chris did not.
Instead, he called out the Secretary and Deputy Secretary of Defense for their lack of leadership, noting how Deputy Secretary Kathleen Hicks hadn’t even visited DIU during her first trip to Silicon Valley. The pointed critique was the kind of thing you only do knowing you’re never going back into government. “Despite notable progress in specific areas and on small scales,” Chris declared, “the organs of innovation Ash Carter set in motion have not meaningfully transformed how the Pentagon as a whole adopts emerging technologies or procures large systems for the future of war.”
In the latest absurdity, which Chris highlighted in his paper, Heidi Shyu, the undersecretary for research and engineering who followed Griffin, was administering a new fund intended to expeditiously transition emerging technologies—it was the signature innovation initiative of Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Of the fourteen critical areas identified, the commercial sector had leapt ahead of the primes in eleven. But out of ten contracts that Shyu announced, only one was made to a venture-backed business.
Mac Thornberry delivered a paper at the Stanford event that backed Chris’s view to the hilt. He opened his own paper with fighting words as well, quoting from Matthew 6:21—“For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also”—and then from Jerry Maguire: “Show me the money.” It was Thornberry’s way of saying that while a lot of people were saying the right things about innovation and technology, we continued spending the defense budget on the wrong things.
Among the tributes that poured in for Carter in the days after his death, one said, “DIU is a true gift Secretary Carter gave to the world.” Yet in January 2023, after Carter was buried, DIU was once again rudderless and adrift, lacking a leader. Mike Brown, whose appointment wasn’t renewed by Heidi Shyu, had departed, and a junior official was serving as DIU’s acting lead. Shyu’s office, charged with the search for Brown’s successor, had let the ball drop. It seemed as if the whole Biden team had forgotten about DIU and Silicon Valley, even as Ukraine was aggressively deploying DIU technologies on the battlefield. To be sure, these were honorable people working on the E-ring. But it was their duty to come to the right answer, and they were blowing the call. The National Security Council staff knew it, and those in its technology directorate were livid at the state of affairs. They had put on as much pressure for different outcomes as they could, but the Pentagon was like a supertanker, not easy to turn.
Meanwhile, worries continued to mount, and not just about Ukraine. China had launched the world’s first nuclear-capable hypersonic weapon—which flies at ten times the speed of sound and evades all known defenses. Its titanium sheath could sink any navy ship at sea. “As I assess our level of deterrence against China, the ship is slowly sinking,” chief of naval operations Admiral John Richardson said in public. It was a rare airing of alarm that members of the Joint Chiefs customarily reserve for civilian leadership in private. “They are putting capability in the field faster than we are. This Ukraine crisis that we’re in right now, this is just the warm-up. The big one is coming. It isn’t going to be very long before we’re going to get tested in ways that we haven’t been tested in a long time.”
After Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan to signal U.S. support in August 2022, China literally went ballistic. During the next two months the People’s Liberation Army flew twelve hundred mock invasion sorties, 40 percent of them entering Taiwan’s air defense identification zone, a clear provocation. There were also flashes of jamming, with drops in communication and GPS over the island. Russia’s sophisticated electronic warfare capabilities in Ukraine were downing drones by the thousand—yet that was nothing compared to what the Chinese possessed and would use against the U.S. in a conflict.
China’s sorties over Taiwan were followed by an astonishing provocation of the U.S. itself. In early 2023, China flew from Alaska to South Carolina a spy balloon that loitered over U.S. nuclear weapons sites and military bases. NORAD’s billion-dollar sensors didn’t initially see it floating across the U.S. The balloon itself seemed to have used the DIU playbook, crammed as it was full of commercially available U.S. gear connected to more specialized Chinese sensors.
Across every military domain, commercial technology continued to change the game. SpaceX had by now launched forty-five hundred Starlink satellites—more than half of all satellites in orbit. Some thirty-seven thousand more were on the way. Elon Musk now had more control over satellite communications than the world’s superpowers. In one instance he refused to extend Starlink’s capabilities to Ukrainian military units aspiring to attack Russian warships in the Crimean Peninsula with unmanned explosive sea drones. The war in Ukraine now turned on what one man said rather than what the U.S. and Ukraine decided. Given his extraordinary intervention in the Ukraine-Russia conflict, would Elon decide to sell his services to Taiwan even though his other business interests, especially Tesla, involved China? The geopolitical complexity was deepening, with the U.S. government behind. To catch up with SpaceX, China was racing to build out its “Guo Wang” constellation of thirteen thousand satellites. Interstellar, Christopher Nolan’s 2014 space thriller, was set in 2067, yet the on-orbit adventures the movie depicted now felt much closer at hand.
Though Putin was bogged down in Ukraine, his military was still devising hair-raising new weapons, the kind Nolan wouldn’t in his worst nightmares have imagined—from nuclear-armed cruise missiles that could skim below radar range and annihilate U.S. cities with no warning, to super-cavitating nuclear torpedoes able to take out entire aircraft carrier groups. Putin even readied the potential launch of a space-based neutron bomb that, when detonated, would wipe out global communications. These technologies could defeat many of the U.S.’s deployed platforms. Then there was quantum technology—miniature sensors that can defeat stealth, power inertial navigation systems, and, when developed into quantum computers, break all known forms of encryption.
The U.S. military needed a technology overhaul, and quickly.
Then a ray of hope appeared.
In April 2023, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin made a bold decision and named Doug Beck to be the new director of DIU. Doug was a vice president at Apple and a navy vet who’d commanded DIU’s Reserve Unit.
Over the years Doug had quietly cultivated relationships in defense circles. He’d advised three chiefs of naval operations, lectured at the Naval Postgraduate School, and served in various defense-related advisory roles in Washington. Ash Carter had pushed Doug hard to succeed Mike at DIU, telling him there is one reason to give up his beloved role at Apple: “Duty.” Doug also served as an unpaid innovation advisor to Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks. Hicks had chartered an Innovation Steering Group and asked it to identify groups in the DoD that were advancing the innovation mission. The group discovered a large and diverse ecosystem, with more than fifty separate organizations, as commands in each service set up their own miniature DIUs. To illustrate the reporting relationship between them, the DoD printed one of its “horse-blanket” charts—Pentagon vernacular for a diagram so large it could keep a horse warm.
It was one thing to make a chart that enumerates organizations flying the banner of innovation, and quite another to prosecute a strategy to bring innovation into the Department at scale. Indeed, for some senior leaders, the existence of an innovation office under their ambit provided cover to give change lip service and hide from making hard trade-offs.
If anyone could do that scaling up, it was Doug. His appointment demonstrated that the Secretary of Defense meant business, especially when Austin insisted that DIU would now report directly to him, as it had under Ash Carter. Doug would also serve as Austin’s advisor on innovation, spotting technologies that had strategic impact.
Behind the scenes, as Doug was discussing the offer from Austin, we’d helped him develop a list of demands and conditions, the sort we’d made before we signed on in 2016. When Doug was appointed, he asked us to join the DIU team again. Chris became an unpaid special government employee and took an advisory role. Doug asked Raj to take the job Doug once had: commanding DIU’s Reserve Unit, which meant leading one hundred technologists who served within it. These were the people who worked in technology companies but also wore the uniform—the connective tissue between leading edge commercial technology and the projects DIU was scoping.
Shortly after Doug’s appointment, we met him at a classic San Francisco diner, Mama’s on Washington Square. Doug walked in expecting frank thoughts on how to succeed in his new mission, but wasn’t expecting just how frank they would be. Truth was, we were worried Doug wasn’t ready for what was about to hit him when he made his first trip to Washington as the director of DIU.
To be sure, Doug had relationships in every corner of the Pentagon and Congress, built in large part by serving on multiple advisory boards and even in combat with many of its leaders. His network was part of the reason Austin had selected him. But we warned him—those relationships were about to change.
“You keep referring to these people as your friends,” Chris said. “They aren’t. They are people you know. You like them, and they like you. But you’re no longer an advisor. You’ll be making real decisions. For the first time, you’ll be threatening their turf, asking them to do things that are hard.”
“Remember,” Raj said, “in Washington it’s a zero-sum game. It’s not like Silicon Valley, where folks can expand the pie by working together. In D.C., power is budget and people. The only way to expand is to take something from someone else. This leads to monumental infighting.”
“You’re reporting directly to the Secretary. That’s great,” Chris said. “But for every hour you spend with Lloyd Austin, someone else is getting left out.”
“So be careful,” Raj concluded. “Watch your back. You’ve seen us get stuck by cloaked daggers, including by ‘friends.’ ”
Doug and Secretary Austin made a smart opening move by narrowing DIU’s focus. During our tenure, and that of our successor, Mike Brown, DIU had worked with a broad spectrum of commercial technology applicable to many kinds of military missions. Under Doug, DIU would zero in on the most strategically consequential technologies to U.S. war plans on China, Taiwan, Ukraine, and Russia. Other innovation entities across various branches of the military could work on the rest.
Austin was changing the metric by which DIU was judged. Instead of counting the number and size of contracts DIU negotiated each year, Austin wanted DIU to drive changes in key Operational Plans—O-Plans, in military speak—to prepare how we’d fight in every imaginable war scenario, especially in the Indo-Pacific. DIU would work closely with the combatant commanders and their war-planning staffs, developing new joint operational concepts powered by novel technological approaches. The insights Doug and DIU gleaned would ultimately roll up to the Secretary himself, helping him change what would get bought across the “Future Years Defense Program,” the elaborate DoD budgets that run five years into the future.
Ash Carter would have been amazed to see this happening—this was his vision, at last operating at scale.
Four months after Ash Carter’s funeral many of the same people who’d been at the cathedral gathered in Washington for an all-day event to advance the mission Carter had asked us to pursue.
There were lots of great panels—Raj spoke onstage with the DARPA director and with Doug, who was making his first remarks as DIU director. But the best indicator of the change occurring in D.C. were remarks made by secretary of the air force Frank Kendall and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley.
Onstage, Kendall shared his plans to buy one thousand to two thousand supersonic drones that would fly as autonomous wingmen alongside fighter aircraft—a project that had started under our tenure at DIU. Driven by AI, able to operate on their own or in tandem with manned aircraft, and with a range equal to the width of China, the drones would carry out a variety of missions, from striking targets, to gathering intelligence, to conducting surveillance, to engaging in reconnaissance. The “Collaborative Combat Aircraft” program was the boldest change to the air force’s doctrine ever. At $3 million per unit, compared to $70 million for an F-35 fighter, these wingman drones would give the air force what its strategists called “affordable mass” in any fight in the Pacific.
The most transformational vision came at the end of the day when Milley brought down the house with rousing closing remarks. He first honored Carter by saying “his action saved American lives on the battlefield, including my own.” Ash understood that “technology is driving the largest fundamental change in the character of war in human history—that the stakes were enormously high.” Our top priority, Milley said, is to prevent the outbreak of a great power war. “No one in this room and in fact none of us in uniform in any nation on earth has lived through a great power war.” Members of Milley’s family were on the front lines of World War I and World War II, and over that thirty-year period, 150 million people were slaughtered. “We are in the midst of one of those fundamental changes,” Milley said. “Nations that are able to successfully combine new technologies are able to create potentially decisive military advantages.”
Milley then made a remarkable statement about technology: “In the next fifteen years we are going to see a pilot-less or at least partially pilot-less air force, a sailor-less or partially sailor-less navy, and a crew-less or partially crew-less tank force on the ground.” His speech captured just how swiftly the uniformed military had come around to the vision that led Ash Carter to create DIU. Milley’s remarks served as a bookend to what Carter had said eight years before, when he made the first trip to Silicon Valley by a Secretary of Defense in over a generation, asking technologists for their help.
Shortly after the gathering, President Biden announced his choice for the next Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, nominating General Charles Brown, the forward-leaning air force chief of staff whom Raj had escorted at Tech Track 2 events.
Then, in an even more astounding development, Congress swung into action and gave DIU’s budget an eye-watering boost—to $1 billion a year. Additional funds from other parts of the military will likely push DIU’s annual outlay for new technologies to $2 billion or more. The 2024 National Defense Authorization Act dedicated an entire section to DIU, granting it new powers in law and stipulating other guidelines that further bolstered its authority. The House and Senate ultimately codified the practice of DIU direct reporting to the Secretary of Defense, established in law the director’s ability to “communicate views… directly to the Secretary without obtaining the approval or concurrence of any other official within the Department of Defense,” and upped DIU’s ability to unilaterally enter into contracts up to half a billion dollars. The new authorities ran a whopping four pages in the final bill, 1,392 words carving in granite what had previously been scrawled with erasable pencil. Five days later the Senate confirmed Steve “Bucky” Butow’s promotion to major general, awarding a second star to DIU’s space maverick who’d been willing to ruffle feathers to deliver for the warfighter.
We were a long way from the days of battling Evelyn and Ed, the two small-minded appropriations staffers who’d “zeroized” DIUx’s tiny $30 million budget the day after Carter traveled to Mountain View and announced our appointment. When Austin made his next trip to Europe, Doug Beck flew on the plane with him to meet with the coalition supplying weapons and aid to Ukraine.
Chris crossed into Ukraine in the middle of the night in the front seat of a Volkswagen sedan whose driver had spent the early months of the war ferrying Starlink Internet terminals to the front. We had been invited by the Ukrainian General Staff and Andrey Liscovich, CEO of the Ukraine Defense Fund. Except for those living within a few miles of the front, Ukrainians went about their lives unpreoccupied by the war—dining out, enjoying warm afternoons in outside cafes, mindful that a cruise missile strike was a real possibility but determined not to be cowed by it. Ukraine was infinitely safer than Iraq or Afghanistan, where violence engulfed every city.
The war the Ukrainians were fighting was everything those at DIUx had imagined—innovators working side by side with soldiers at the front, new kinds of weapons made in garage shops rushed into battle, software being updated on a daily basis, all focused on defeating an authoritarian enemy.
Chris’s first meeting with the General Staff was surreal. A cell of programmers and engineers drafted into military service had taken over the headquarters of a cosmetics company in Kyiv. Andrey guided Chris past armed guards and up a courtyard elevator. Sliding glass doors emblazoned with images of cosmetics models opened to reveal hulking Ukrainian Special Forces troops checking IDs. It was a scene straight out of James Bond. Behind the doors several hundred Ukrainians were writing military software. Created in the mold of Carter’s Defense Digital Service, the unit streamlined the military’s internal processes, turning its paper-intensive reporting system—every battalion command along the front lugged along a laser printer and extra toner—into a paperless future. Officers who’d previously found themselves spending hours filling out routine forms rather than leading combat missions could complete their tasks on a tablet in minutes, thanks to the new apps being coded behind the cosmetic company’s doors.
The second meeting took place inside a public facility commandeered by the Ministry of Defense. There Chris met with the intelligence chief responsible for targeting Russian forces through commercial imagery and signals intelligence. His team used Capella SAR images overlayed with signals intercepts plotted by Hawkeye 360 to attack Russian positions. While U.S. spy satellites provided better targeting information to a select few in the Ukrainian chain of command, the commercial data could be widely shared with front-line troops without fear of compromising classified sources. It was a glimmer of the future, in which anyone with a credit card could buy imagery and signals intercepts that only superpowers once had.
Outside formal Ministry of Defense structures, tinkerers of all kinds worked around the capital in secret workshops hidden in alleyways and unmarked office spaces. A year and a half into the war two hundred scrappy companies designed drones and counter-drone systems, self-driving vehicles, autonomous de-mining robots, even remotely controlled machine guns. Drones by this point in the war had become akin to shells or bombs or bullets—a commodity used by militaries fighting one another. One of the larger drone factories in Kyiv was set up in the storefront of a former electronics retailer—the Ukrainian equivalent of Best Buy—whose vacant showroom still had wall signs advertising big screen TVs. An assembly line would, in minutes, deliver a four-rotor kamikaze drone ready to be mated with a 1.75-kilogram shell—with either a brass-colored ballistic cap to penetrate armor or one with a ball of steel needles to attack dismounted soldiers. These munitions had been used to repel Russian attempts to take the city of Avdiivka and its railway junctures and coal-rich districts. Ukrainian drone operators—piloting quadcopters from behind the front—stopped infantry assaults before they started, by killing entire platoons of Russian soldiers as they exited armored personnel carriers, and used armor-piercing rounds to disable over two hundred tanks and tracked vehicles.
Homegrown Ukrainian drones were so effective Russia began targeting drone factories with cruise missiles, leading many companies to move their facilities to the city of Lviv, which was located in Western Ukraine, only an hour from the Polish border, mostly out of range. Raj and two investors from NATO’s new venture capital fund met Chris there. They’d arrived by overnight train, looking to identify companies they could invest in directly or start a joint venture with. What we found was at once astonishing and disappointing, and yet at the same time an enormous opportunity.
Our first stop that morning in Lviv was at one of Ukraine’s most advanced robotics manufacturers. As we arrived, we could hear in the distance the rumblings of a cruise missile strike—a reminder that we were in a country at war. Our second stop took us to a company whose drones functioned as miniature U-2s. Their digital cameras flew in a lawnmower-like pattern over the battlefield. They returned priceless imagery that was quickly turned into real-time maps and images of potential targets. Attack drones would then utilize artificial intelligence to home in on Russian positions, killing the “picture” their targeting algorithm was programmed to see. Our third stop was at a test range where drones battled against counter-drone electronic warfare systems in a game of mock combat using software that teams had updated just the night before. There, we watched as a Ukrainian drone pilot latched a bottle of Diet Coke to his drone’s weapons bay—simulating an actual kinetic payload—and, using artificial-reality piloting glasses, proceeded to drop it directly in the target ring.
We also controlled a long-range surveillance drone, using a joystick to swivel and zoom thermal and optical sensors back at the test range from ten kilometers away. Despite costing one-hundredth of a similar Western system’s price, the optics were so good that we could easily identify ourselves among the crowd assembled at the test site. The auto-lock function precisely tracked a person as they walked away. None of the jamming equipment at the range that day succeeded in disabling the drones that were flying—not the quarter-million-dollar truck-mounted system deployed by a Western defense contractor or the rifle-style electronic warfare guns made by Ukrainian firms. Raj, of course, had used such technology in his F-16, but marveled at how cheaply and quickly the technology was evolving.
Impressive as all this tech was, it was apparent that it would be an error to think of the two hundred Ukrainian entities experimenting with UAS and C-UAS as traditional early-stage companies. Most were small teams supported with private capital from wealthy Ukrainians with only a loose goal of creating a long-term business. Their primary aim was to kill Russians. Almost all lacked managerial robustness, the ability to navigate supply chain bottlenecks, or the skill to market to either the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense or international investors. Personal relationships with the military units determined which units actually deployed new technology and weapons at the front. All of this complicated the ability to scale local battlefield success through ordinary market mechanisms or the pull of defense requirements.
This is not to say the technology we saw wasn’t ingenious. Quite the contrary. We saw controllable balloons called aerostats and “mothership drones” that had launched smaller attack drones hundreds of miles beyond the front and deep inside Russia. We met the firms that helped carry out the war’s most successful attacks, devastating Russian naval assets in the Black Sea and even striking buildings in the Kremlin. We held in our hands a drone whose original use was smuggling cigarettes into the European Union, only to be repurposed as a bomber after war broke out. These systems cost pennies on the dollar compared with what Western firms could deploy, but none could yet scale in a way that would alter the course of the war.
How to address the scaling challenge was the topic of two days of meetings in Warsaw convened by DIU. We got to the conference hotel at 2 a.m., after a thirteen-hour journey out of Ukraine by car. After a short sleep we joined two hundred U.S. and Ukrainian officials, representatives from Ukrainian drone companies, venture capitalists, and business development staff from Western defense contractors. DIU director Doug Beck flew straight from the Pentagon to deliver opening remarks. The idea was to bring together in one place the buyers, the sellers, the tactical users, and the subject matter experts.
“The war is in the spectrum,” one Ukrainian military official noted, speaking to the intense jamming, spoofing, and electronic warfare by each side. Another theme was that the drone threat wasn’t uniquely Ukrainian. “Over the long term, every nation will face a ‘drone nightmare’ similar to the current crisis in Ukraine,” one Ukrainian minister said. “What we learn is relevant to all democracies,” noted a member of Ukraine’s parliament. Dissatisfaction with the battlefield performance of Western drones was another motif. “I faced a big wave of disappointment” was what one Ukrainian soldier said about the first time he used a U.S. drone in combat. “The challenges of UAS in Ukraine aren’t something we prepared Blue UAS companies for,” a DIU official said, acknowledging the shortcomings of U.S. manufacturers who produced drones that for the most part were defeated by Russian EW systems within minutes of being launched. The harsh reality was that U.S. drones were the emperor without clothes—seemingly superior in specifications but dismal in actual battlefield performance. Were the U.S. in a drone fight with Russia, it could lose.
Raj led a breakout session titled “The Business of the UAS Industry” that zeroed in on barriers to scale and how to overcome them. He aimed to lay the groundwork for advanced Ukrainian companies to scale with Western partners. In a session on technology transfer, Chris and a Ukrainian lawmaker diagrammed how DIU might be able to operate faster than the current complex way in which the Pentagon provides security assistance. It was a remarkable gathering, the kind of get-together where an unarmed kamikaze drone left sitting on the sink in the men’s room wasn’t out of place. It was also a highly personal one, where the grief of the war borne by every Ukrainian in the room became real to those who hadn’t experienced it firsthand.
At a NATO dinner the first night of the conference, held in the oldest restaurant in Warsaw, Chris sat across from a woman named Nataliia Kushnerska, the COO of Ukraine’s military innovation unit, Brave 1. Her husband served as a sniper even as she tried to raise their two children, age four and seven, in an atmosphere of normalcy in Kyiv. Much of her family had been trapped behind Russian lines during the initial invasion. They were farmers and shopkeepers. Many didn’t survive. The humanitarian toll was a subtext to every conversation. That feeling of acute loss continued after the conference. On the flight home Chris was seated next to a Ukrainian refugee family from Chernobyl who were emigrating to Canada. Their three English-speaking children, Denis, fifteen, Sophie, seven, and Alexander, five, were terribly nervous. Chris tried to keep them smiling but had little luck reinforcing their parents’ efforts to calm them. War is a horrible thing. Chris would go on to accept an offer from the Ukrainian General Staff to become one of their international military advisors. Yet that wouldn’t do anything for Denis, Sophie, and Alexander, who would now depend on the compassion of Canadian schoolmates and the suburb their parents settled them in. Raj and his wife had an equally solemn experience the day after the conference concluded, visiting Auschwitz. They flew back to the U.S. thinking about the world their four-year-old son would eventually inherit.
There was a historical echo as well. Warsaw had been leveled in the last months of 1944 by the Nazis after the Polish resistance attacked German positions as Soviet troops approached. A city of 1.2 million people was reduced to less than a thousand living amid smoking rubble. The DIU conference took place in a city built anew, yet the hotel everyone gathered in was only a mile away from the Warsaw Ghetto, in which the Nazis had imprisoned half a million Jews before sending them to their deaths at Treblinka and Auschwitz. Soviet liberators, who entered the city in January 1945, quickly turned into oppressors. Poland wouldn’t win freedom until the fall of the Berlin Wall. Now its neighbor was in the grips of Russian forces whose pretext for invading was protecting ethnic Russians who lived in Crimea from alleged “neo-Nazi groups” terrorizing them.
That Putin’s transparent propaganda had seemingly energized the Russian populace was hard to fathom. We were indeed a long way from The End of History, where capitalist markets reinforce democracy for all.
The year 2024 was shaping up to be pivotal with make-or-break decisions in industrial policy and military modernization that would determine the next generation of military capability, the success or failure of the new wave of defense startups and venture funds that back them, and ultimately the geometry of Silicon Valley−Pentagon relations.
For Raj, it was particularly striking how quickly modern technology, especially low-cost drones, was changing the calculus of fighter aviation. Nearly two decades before, in Iraq, his F-16 fighter jet lacked a moving map. It was a critical capability that should have been there to help pilots from accidently crossing into Iran and coming in range of its anti-aircraft batteries. The Compaq tablet computer that Raj strapped to his knee was his personal hack to bring a moving map into the cockpit. It worked well enough to tide things over until the F-16 finally upgraded to a moving map several years later. But put Raj back in an F-16 today and there is no hack he could devise to protect himself from the omnipresent drone threat along the Ukrainian front.
The F-16 was built to shoot down MIGs. If a MIG threatened the U.S. in 2024 and Raj was in the cockpit, odds are good that he could down his adversary and return safely. But today’s fighter pilots face a different enemy: before their jets even get off the runway they can be destroyed by cheap kamikaze drones. This is exactly what the Ukrainians did to the Russian air base in Pskov in September 2023. An enemy could hide hundreds of drones in the back of a passing truck just miles from our fixed bases. Not only do most U.S. air bases lack sophisticated counter-UAS systems to keep jets safe on the ground from such a swarm attack, but the F-16 and all modern fighters have no weapon capable of shooting down small drones. If drones attacked, Raj could try to quickly fly away when the alarm sounded, but he’d likely die trying. This isn’t a position those whom we ask to protect us should ever be in. Nor is it even remotely acceptable that the defense of our country could fail because so many capability gaps like this compromise U.S. battle systems.
We are in a crisis unlike any our generation has faced before. Shockingly, most Americans don’t even know that our military’s might has been largely eclipsed by the commercial systems our adversaries are bringing to battle. Innovating is our only way out.
Ylli Bajraktari described the stakes in his classic blunt style: “We should try hard to suck less,” he said. “The CHIPS Act took three years even though we had a broad coalition, with no antibodies in Congress or the administration. Why is everything so hard in our system? We’re talking about getting capabilities online in 2035? Who cares? The maximum danger to our country is 2025 to 2030. That’s the next budget cycle.”
Ylli echoed what General Douglas MacArthur noted on the eve of America’s entry into World War II, saying in 1940 that “The history of failure in war can almost be summed up in two words: ‘too late.’ ” “A typhoon of steel” is how Japanese soldiers described World War II. Would America be ready for a typhoon of silicon?
Yet there was some promising news. In 2023 the army rolled out Google collaboration suites to 180,000 personnel, continuing the trend DIUx started of using commercial IT solutions instead of maintaining bespoke networks. General Milley’s last major act as chairman was to propose a Joint Futures organization, whose mission would be to help the innovation centers in various branches of the military collaborate, so that the different technology platforms they sponsor can connect to each other seamlessly. The Department also expanded further the scope of OTA contracts, allowing them to be used for operations and maintenance funding—a major and previously off-limits category of expenditure—and blazing a path for follow-on production contracts to become even more frictionless.
U.S. allies were also getting in the game. Australia, the U.S., and the UK announced a series of measures to jointly develop more advanced technology, including quantum sensors and nuclear submarines, and to link their manufacturing bases tightly together, so they’d be better arrayed against China’s massive industrial capability. Japan took greater steps to ready its military for the competition with China, and to link its efforts with South Korea and other Asian allies. Biden held the first Camp David summit of his presidency with the prime minister of Japan and the president of Korea, to discuss the China threat.
Other wins included the Pentagon’s embrace of the generative AI revolution. The DoD launched “Task Force Lima” to speed experimentation with large language models like ChatGPT across the military. Also, Scale AI, the Silicon Valley startup whose CEO Alex Wang joined Chris to advise the White House on China, became the first company to provide generative AI capabilities to the Pentagon. Scale AI’s software platform, called Donovan, uses generative AI models for military planning and battlefield monitoring. U.S. Central Command hired Andrew Moore, the former director of Google’s Cloud AI, who served on the AI Commission. DIU went even further, establishing AI battle labs within the military’s European and Pacific commands. A new defense venture fellowship program also placed Pentagon personnel for short immersion experiences at forty leading defense tech companies and VCs, including Joby Aviation, Shield Capital, and Beacon AI.
Then in a surprise move, at the annual conference of the Defense Industry Association, with all the primes in attendance, Deputy Secretary Kathleen Hicks announced the “Replicator Initiative,” a multibillion-dollar bet on autonomous AI-driven aerial, seaborne, and undersea drones. DIU helped conceive how the initiative could integrate technology from startups with exquisite systems from the primes. It was a remarkable bet on the future and a sign of how much the conflict in Ukraine was shaping how those in the E-ring thought about which capabilities needed to be fast-tracked. Not long after, Hicks and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin visited DIU to see tech demos associated with Replicator and meet with the startup CEOs who will build it. Austin even hosted a meeting of AUKUS at DIU, bringing together the ministers of defense from Australia and the United Kingdom to collaborate on emerging China-deterring technologies.
Austin and Hick’s pivot happened so fast it left some primes grumbling that their plans should have been more concrete and come with already passed budgets, as they’re accustomed to getting before starting new work. Some startups selling to the Pentagon pushed back, apocalyptically angry at the primes’ attack on the Department’s new direction. “For years, defense technology companies have urged Defense leaders to move faster and buy new capabilities at larger scales,” Anduril’s chief strategy officer Christian Brose posted on LinkedIn. “The Deputy Secretary of Defense launched the Replicator initiative to buy and field thousands of autonomous systems in 18−24 months. Pretty good, right? Apparently not. ‘Disorganized and confusing?’ Compared to what? All of those multi-decade zombie programs everyone always complains about?”
Russia, meanwhile, was already a year down the road on its own version of Replicator, paying Iran a billion dollars to stand up a factory capable of producing six thousand advanced kamikaze drones a year. Russian strategists saw these swarming, autonomous, and low-cost drones as the weapon that could win the war for them.
Unbeknownst to U.S. or Israeli intelligence, Hamas also had its own miniature Replicator Initiative underway, using quadcopters to drop explosives on the generators that powered Israeli security towers on the Gaza Strip border. Those strikes enabled fourteen hundred fighters to pour undetected into Israel and massacre more than one thousand civilians, precipitating an Israeli ground invasion of Gaza and the most violent conflict in the region since the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. That same week drones launched by Hezbollah injured over twenty U.S. service members and contractors working in Syria and Iraq, leaving several U.S. personnel with traumatic brain injuries. In retaliation, the U.S. military executed multiple airstrikes on drone factories in Syria. Yet the attacks continued, numbering over one hundred by the end of 2023 and injuring forty-six additional U.S. personnel. Houthi rebels, based in Yemen but supported by Iran, then began attacking ships in the Red Sea. With the help of Iranian spy ships that pinpointed targets, the Houthis launched cruise missiles and drones at oil tankers, forcing the U.S. and allied navy destroyers to use $2 million missiles to knock $2,000 kamikaze drones out of the sky. Oil prices rose overnight as traders grew concerned that the twelve percent of global shipping that passes through the Red Sea might be disrupted. Three U.S. service members were killed in January 2024 when a drone struck their base in Jordan, leading the U.S. and U.K. to launch multiple retaliatory strikes.
Yet even as the new way of war becomes more visible, hard choices lie ahead. For the cost of a single aircraft carrier, the navy can purchase 18,000 unmanned Saildrones—more than 350 for each of the United States’ fifty-plus treaty allies we’re obligated to defend if attacked. Those at DIU know which they’d choose to buy, though, admittedly, an American admiral ordered to carry out airstrikes against a foreign country would think differently.
These are the trade-offs the military now faces. It can’t be one or the other—all new or all old—when it comes to how the U.S. military will fight in the future. The Pentagon must now strike a careful balance, recapitalizing older systems with new technology while also building entirely new platforms around novel operational concepts. But at least now everyone grasps that the Pentagon will not win a future war without embracing emerging technology in equal or greater measure than its adversaries.
We think the greatest accomplishment of DIU is proving to the Pentagon that innovation is possible—at speed and at scale. “Died in the Valley of Death” is written on the tombstone of most attempts to move from experimentation to the battlefield. Countless policy wonks have imagined how to leap this chasm since the consumer technology explosion began around 1990. What DIU did is finally hit on a winning formula. That formula has seven key elements and is relevant to other large institutions seeking to innovate from the inside. The Pentagon, after all, is not the first entity that experienced success only to be hindered, as times changed, by the very processes and culture that led it to be dominant.
The first key element is to work on critical warfighter problems. While back-office improvements can help servicemen and -women, focusing on problems closer to the front of the spear makes initiatives more difficult for detractors to block. No one wants to be publicly exposed as impeding proven solutions that directly impact life-and-death situations.
The second element is to use real tech. In the defense world, entrenched contractors, responding to incentives, often repackage aging technology and market it as new. They take statistical techniques and with a straight face sell them as artificial intelligence to officials who are none the wiser. As disruptors, we learned to select problems and solutions where modern technology could provide a 10x improvement. That stark difference in performance significantly improves the odds of ousting a defense prime that’s had the contract for a decade or more.
Having strong top-cover is our formula’s third ingredient. Change is hard, especially so in the world’s largest bureaucracy. Change agents need protection, the higher the better. For us it was Secretaries Carter and Mattis. We’ve seen other defense innovation organizations launch across the military services. Those with support at the highest levels (air force) flourished and those without (army) suffered.
Keeping a healthy irreverence is our approach’s fourth plank. Pentagon processes are so tangled that outsiders must approach them like British archaeologists uncovering the Ziggurat of Ur—only with painstaking interpretation does one come to understand the impenetrable, archaic methods of operation. At times you simply have to ignore processes entirely and find a way to blast through, seeking forgiveness rather than asking permission.
Having the right fuel in your tank is the fifth element. For DIU that meant access to modest amounts of flexible money. As startups that run on shoestring budgets demonstrate day in and day out, innovation, counterintuitively, usually requires far less capital than big, bloated processes. But that capital must be flexible enough to support the twists and turns—and sometimes pivots—that occur while innovating.
The sixth element in DIU’s winning formula is to battle, while at the same time co-opting, entrenched interests. Ultimately, for our work to scale, we needed the entrenched interests to come to our side, or at least cease their siege warfare. Those groups include Congress, mid-level officials, and old defense incumbents. In our most successful projects we eventually won over each through different means. It’s impossible to scale as a lone ranger.
Building a team with conviction and the resolve to see it through is the seventh and most crucial element. Our fellow partners Vishaal and Isaac, COO Ernie Bio, and the other nearly one hundred uniformed and civilian members of the DIUx team each brought different skills to our fight. Yet they were all united in the cause and willing to work in service of it, whether that meant taking lower pay, risking a military promotion, or simply burning the midnight oil to notch another project success. We succeeded because our team delivered on the mission.
We also learned that innovating will not alone guarantee geopolitical stability. Deterring future war will require more than just military prowess. It will require influencing global trade, which is underpinned by the same revolutions in technology. In this way, China’s strategy of civil-military fusion, and more broadly connecting the power and resources of the state to Chinese companies competing in global markets, is a pacing threat to our own economy as well as to our allies’.
China’s tactics have shown some signs of success. Over the last few years, China has spent over $240 billion bailing out countries that were recipients of the CCP’s Belt and Road global infrastructure initiative, causing them to be financially and politically indebted. Those among China’s neighbors that are predisposed to lean toward America, such as the Philippines, Vietnam, and Singapore, are limited in doing so due to having China as their largest trading partner. And China’s co-option has sometimes taken the form of brazen physical seizures. In just the last decade massive Chinese military air bases have been built on disputed lands in the South China Sea. In his 2024 New Year’s address, President Xi used stronger words than ever before, calling Taiwanese “reunification” inevitable, an escalation that worried defense analysts. China has moved into the western hemisphere and signed significant military and intelligence cooperation agreements with Cuba, just sixty miles from Florida’s coast. Xi has also purged senior military leadership, “disappearing” his former defense minister and appointing more compliant officials in their place. Yet cracks are emerging in the façade. Longtime China watchers believe Xi’s crackdown will be fatal to China’s longer-term ambitions. Leading businessmen and technologists are fleeing the country and transferring their capital assets abroad, potentially starting a death spiral in China’s economy that will be difficult to reverse.
We have the tools, the people, the capital markets, and the goodwill to prevail and ensure that the American experiment of self-determination flourishes along with that of our allies, but we must rise above our internal squabbles. The changes required will be monumental, on the E-ring, at the White House, and in Congress. Fortunately, glimmers of hope have begun to emerge. The 118th Congress launched a new Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, chaired by Representative Mike Gallagher (R-WI), a stalwart supporter of DIU. His committee has spotlighted the challenge of delinking China’s campaign of civil-military fusion from the Western capital that currently fuels it. In his words, “If American capital continues to flow to Chinese military companies, we are at risk of funding our own destruction.” In 2021 the total level of venture funding invested in Chinese companies exceeded the amount invested in U.S. companies. Yet by the first half of 2023, U.S. investment in China had dropped by 30 percent, with U.S. venture investing in Chinese startups down a staggering 80 percent. The Biden administration has enacted further restrictions on U.S. investments in advanced industries in China, all but stopping outbound financial flows for AI, quantum, and advanced semiconductors. The decoupling from China boosted Mexico to become the United States’s largest trading partner for the first time in twenty years.
In 2023, NATO jumped on the commercial technology bandwagon, announcing a €1 billion Innovation Fund that will make its first tech startup investments this year. Raj was appointed to its board of directors. The trilateral security pact between the U.S., UK, and Australia, known as AUKUS, will bolster technology sharing to include nuclear submarines. Other allies too have launched their own DIUs, including Singapore, the United Kingdom, France, India, Ukraine, Australia, Taiwan, Japan, and Korea. Congress has even turned the reforms lens on itself and the Pentagon by launching the Commission on Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution Reform, an attempt to reform the budgeting system of the Pentagon, which has remained unchanged since Robert McNamara was running the department in the 1960s. Congress intends to make the budgeting process more flexible so the military can more quickly capitalize on technological opportunities. Raj is one of the commissioners—an appointment for which he’s received an equal measure of congratulations and condolences. In March 2024, he and his fellow commissioners recommended that Congress replace the existing budget process with an agile, flexible system that can fully harness modern technology development, moving away from the three thousand line items that place money into immovable silos in the thousand-section-long National Defense Authorization Act.
The biggest challenge beyond politics will be the inherent conservatism of the military. Scholars of security policy have long noted the preeminence of politics and organizational interests in shaping what capacities defense institutions develop. The literature on this point is voluminous and depressing, with self-interest and established ways of warfighting almost always trumping new notions of prevailing threats. The British Navy at first rejected steamships. Cavalry units thought the tank would never succeed. The army was so opposed to the introduction of airplanes to the modern battlefield that the air force, an entirely new military service, had to be created. The pilots running the air force then opposed the introduction of ballistic and cruise missiles, believing manned bombers were the only answer. The same service at first opposed drones, naming them “remotely piloted vehicles” in an attempt to keep the service’s culture internally coherent.
The greatest kind of patriots, we believe, are those who so cherish our country’s ideals that they’re not afraid to challenge the institutions that guard them. Members of Congress must show sustained leadership, taking votes that will ultimately keep their constituents safer even if this means giving up legacy defense jobs in their districts. The Secretary of Defense must drive the Pentagon to change more quickly than ever before. The Joint Chiefs must follow suit, honoring the tradition of their military services by remaking them. Stasis is even more likely in the present political environment, with its stark divides across and within the parties. Profiles in Courage, the title of John F. Kennedy’s 1956 chronicle of political bravery, are now what we need most.
The ultimate goal is not to win wars but to deter them. Innovation is our asymmetric means to achieve and maintain peace. The question now is whether the Pentagon will develop at scale the battlefield innovations it has incubated.
Advocates of innovation must keep pressing despite the seemingly Sisyphean task of reform. Leadership must back them to the hilt.
If DIUx has taught us anything, it’s that the sound of glass breaking is the melody of progress.