The American public is probably not as aware of the threat environment. The explosion of drones, electronic warfare methods, cyber attacks, quantum sensing, hypersonics are a different threat altogether. The AI stuff's for real. I'm combining some of the most important data that the United States has from an intelligence standpoint. We're deploying it to warfighters.
You led global business growth through Uber before. Uber famously is one of the fastest-moving companies ever. Can you bring some of that startup speed to the Pentagon?
In two months, we were able to launch Gen AI, which is Google's Gemini, for every employee.
Obviously, you can't tell us everything you're doing at the bleeding edge. Is there anything you could tell us about that's like really hard, fun challenges you guys are working on?
Every day I wake up and I think—
Emil Michael ran growth at Uber and built one of the fastest-paced companies in Silicon Valley. He's now the Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering. This means he's in charge of helping the Pentagon and the Department of War work with our top companies and our top researchers and scientists to confront the biggest threats our country is facing. He's redefined the critical areas to focus on: obviously different parts of AI, battlefield sensing, hypersonics, directed energy. We're going to hear from Emil why he's focused on these areas, how he's getting the Pentagon to move at the pace of Silicon Valley, and how President Trump, the Secretary of War, and the team with Emil at the Pentagon are working to deter our adversaries and achieve peace through strength. Welcome to American Optimist. Excited to be here in the Pentagon today with our friend Emil Michael. Emil, you're now the Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering. Is that right?
It used to be called another title when you first joined, but now it's War.
This is what you do around here is you know how to fight wars in order to keep the peace. Right.
Right. Peace through strength is about being able to make wars to keep peace. Right.
We were just at the Reagan Library this weekend. That was President Reagan's thing you focused on, which I think is great for the country. You know, it's really inspiring to me to see some of our best minds from the technology world coming in here moving quickly to make the Pentagon work in new ways. Thank you for serving as you're doing. Can you tell us what inspired you to do this? This is different than what you've done in the past. Like, what brought you in?
You know, Joe, I was a White House fellow in 2009, over 15 years ago. And I got to work with the Secretary of Defense at the time, Robert Gates, and I traveled with him to Afghanistan, Iraq. Having never served in the military, I saw the inside of what the military looked like. And I was like, "Someday I'm going to go back with the right president at the right time, with the right job." And those three things aligned to me.
Why is this the right president for this? What does that mean in this context?
For me, he is clearly a disruptor. We think about disruptors in business, right, like you and I in the tech world; he's a disruptor in politics. And one could argue—I would argue—that the system's been broken for a long time in a lot of ways. So if a disruptive president comes in and you have a disruptive secretary of war, then you're like, "Wow, I could really actually change stuff, not just talk about it." And that's what I mean.
I love it. So you run one of the military's most critical offices, basically in the US government. You're directing our military's research into advanced technologies, into advanced weaponry. Officially, you're reporting up to Deputy Feinberg.
They call it a Principal Staff Assistant to the Secretary, but then the Deputy Secretary sort of essentially manages me and the other under secretaries so that with one voice we advise the Secretary of War.
Got it. So you guys will align on things and bring it to them. Is there lots of debate sometimes before you bring things to them?
Yeah, we debate a lot. I mean, you have three military services—Army, Navy, Air Force, and the Marines inside there, now the Space Force—and then that's sort of vertical, if you will. And then horizontal, you have the Under Secretary for Research and Engineering, for Acquisition and Sustainment, for Policy, for the Comptroller, which is CFO. So it's the biggest organization in the world, it's 3 million people, so it's incredibly complex. So yeah, you have debates.
Even though you'd been working with Robert Gates a little bit 15 years ago, you came in as an outsider. You didn't have your clearances, I don't think, until you even got here. So I think when you first come in, you get your first threat briefing, right? What was your reaction to it? What did you think?
I would say that the American public is probably not as aware of the threat environment with our adversaries as we were when we were growing up and during the Cold War and we were doing drills in school.
Yeah, you'd have to hide under the desk in case something happened. I don't know if that would have helped with the nukes very much, but they made you think about it.
Made you think about it every day. Remember, there was a movie about The Day After. I mean, all these things, or this great power rivalry. And people don't quite see China as a great power rivalry, but it is, both economically and militarily. And so being able to see that and understand that from that position really reinforced to me like, holy cow, we're in a similar type of moment where there's a great power rivalry happening, and most people don't feel the same way we felt it.
And did it feel like when you came in here, was there a sense of, "Oh my gosh, we're not ready. We need to be doing something differently or better or faster?"
I would say that during the Global War on Terror—the Afghanistan War and the second Iraq War—we were building our military to fight an irregular army: kind of ragtag, improvised explosive devices. So, we were thinking about how we armor our tanks. When we were doing that, China was investing in sophisticated military equipment. They were starting from a clean sheet of paper. They didn't have legacy systems like we had and all that.
We were the target for them to compete against.
Right. We were the pacing threat for them. So, they were using technology where we were kind of going backwards in a way and trying to protect against not a sophisticated army, but just a bunch of tribal sort of things. So we then need to catch up and surpass China again. I think we're already caught up in so many areas and surpassed them. But they've made a lot of ground since then.
And you know, you led global business growth through Uber before. Uber famously is one of the fastest-moving companies ever. It's probably not possible for the entire Pentagon and 3 million people to move as fast as you guys did at Uber. But can you bring some of that startup speed to the Pentagon? Is any of that working so far? Is that even a model at all that inspires you to push harder?
Absolutely. I mean, every day I wake up and I think, if we have this once-in-a-lifetime moment where we have a disruptive president, a disruptive secretary of war, and I'm in this job—I'm not going to do it forever—how do I leave my mark on behalf of the country? So, I wake up every day thinking that way and trying to bring the Uber practices. And some of those are actually kind of normal business practices: when something's not getting done, you call everyone in a room, you do standups every day until you get to the answer. Someone says, "Well, you can't do that," I say, "Well, show me the policy." And you find your way to answers, which is why in two months of having the Chief AI Office run in my world, which was a new move, we were able to launch Gen AI, which is Google's Gemini, for every employee, military and civilian in the department. And they never had AI on their desktop before. Now it's on every single desktop in two months. So, it can be done.
That's awesome. And it's interesting, too, because back when I was at Palantir a lot more heavily, they refused to do Maven, and I remember going on TV a decade ago saying they're not a patriotic company. It seems like it's changed. They're actually willing to work with you now.
Big time. I'll give Google a lot of credit. They were the first of the big frontier AI companies to say, "We want to work with the Department of Defense." They were easy to work with on the contract. We're paying 47 cents for the whole year for all of this. So they're taking a loss to make sure that they were the first in the department. I think some of the others will follow. But yes, a totally different world. And I say that to them all the time: during the cloud wars, your employees were chaining themselves to their desk because they didn't want to do—
President Trump has ended the world, I don't know, man.
It did. And they say it's a new day at Google. And I love it.
Yeah. I think October 7th might have affected some of the leaders, too. Anyway, it's complicated what happened there. I want to talk about other things you've done. You made some pretty big announcements. One of the things in general as a leader, if you have dozens of things you're focused on, it might mean you're not focused on anything, right? So you have to narrow things down and focus. And I noticed on the Critical Technologies List, I think there were like at least 14 before. You've chosen six of those you've announced that are now the real critical focus. Tell us about these.
Yeah. So, Congress wrote in legislation that I, as the CTO—I'm also the Chief Technology Officer of the Department of War—have to come up with critical technology areas that guide the rest of the department on how to spend their R&D dollars effectively. And two predecessors ago they added 10. Then the next predecessor added four, and that was eight years ago. So now you're looking at 20, 25, 26, saying, "Are those the same things?" And by the way, you've run a business: how many corporate values do you have? You can't have 14. It doesn't make sense.
It doesn't make sense, right? No one can remember them.
You can't wake up every day thinking, "This is what I have to do every day." It has to be push one of these missions. So, I spent a couple months analyzing these things, figuring out what the right ones for the threat environment were. And we came down to six. And I really believe in them, and I think they're going to be good guidance for everyone.
And I have cheat codes cuz I wrote them down myself, because I wouldn't have remembered all of them necessarily. Of course, I would become an expert on this stuff, but it's applied AI, which is pretty obvious, but really, really critical. What are some of the things other than the Google win that you've done there?
Yeah, so the Google win was just getting everyone the basic access to AI so they could get familiar using it and understanding it. That's a corporate use case, right, like any big organization. Then we're going to do the same thing for intelligence: how do you analyze mountains of intelligence that we have that we currently rely on humans for, and allow a human to analyze more with less by using computers effectively? And then warfighting, which is logistical planning, modeling, and simulation—all things that go into a battle.
Command and control has to obviously be—I know Palantir are working really hard on the new C2 systems there, which is obviously critical for our country. And it's interesting you mentioned, because contested logistics was one of the others, and we have companies like Gallatin working on that. Is this just a big focus of yours then, to kind of fix that?
Yeah, because contested logistics means how do you operate in a remote environment and sustain troops and weapon systems and defensive systems when they're far away from a military base? And if there's ever a conflict in the Pacific, it will by definition be remote and, frankly, the most remote place you could imagine. Contested logistics is: how do we move stuff around? How do we move people around? Food, water, medicine, systems, ammo, fuel, you name it. And so, what technologies are we going to use to enable our warfighters to sustain themselves in a remote context?
I love it. Another one was biomanufacturing. I've invested a lot of money in that area. It's been very hard with the competition internationally to have America sustain this. Is this something the Department of War is working on?
Yeah, because biology could do a lot of things. Biological organisms could separate rare earth metals. Biological organisms can create TNT, gunpowder, energetics, if you will. Biological materials can create materials that you could fix aircraft with, and all kinds of things.
Our company Cambium has special heat shielding, where you actually get the best heat shielding in the world using a biomanufacturing technique, right? So, some fun stuff there.
Right, fun stuff. And we've been behind again because some of our adversaries have been dumping with rare earth metals to get us dependent on battery technologies, on critical minerals, pharmaceuticals, you name it. So part of my job also is to use these technologies to rebuild the defense industrial base and the industrial base in America broadly speaking.
I love it. And you guys have a new Office of Biotechnologies. You're taking it seriously. Some good stuff.
Another one that is interesting: is it called Quantum and Battlefield Information Dominance? Why is quantum in that one?
Quantum is because people think about quantum and think about quantum computing, but it's also quantum sensing. Quantum sensing uses waves to find and communicate in a battlefield. So we want to call that out as part of the overall information environment in a battlefield. You have sensors, radars, radio communications, satellite, and quantum sensing. And that is also going to be a contested area because lots of countries now have satellites there. That wasn't the case 20 years ago. We were the only country that really had satellites.
Does this include the part of electronic warfare of turning on and off sensors and interference and that kind of stuff, watching what's going on?
Because to dominate, you have to not only have your own, but you have to make sure the enemy doesn't block yours, right?
100%. You have to be able to do this at scale cheaply, right? Which is a big issue because I know a lot of our old stuff is just so expensive to scale. And then scaled hypersonics, I think that speaks for itself, but that's a hard one.
So scaled hypersonics and scaled directed energy. The technology is there; we understand how to do hypersonics. A hypersonic missile can be a missile that flies at Mach 5 or more and it's maneuverable. So we used to be worried about intercontinental ballistic missiles where you could project their path and then try to intercept them. Hypersonics are a different threat altogether. They go faster and they're maneuverable, so it means it's harder to take them down.
So the stuff we are blocking from Iran that was shot at Israel, those are also hypersonic, but they're not the same thing as hypersonics because even though they're going really fast, they're not maneuverable.
Not maneuverable, and they're not going at hypersonic speeds also.
Even when they're re-entering?
Frankly, in re-entering, they slow down.
That's why we take them out when they're up there in space. But these other ones are much, much harder to deal with.
Much, much harder to deal with. Well, so we know how to build our own, but we have to do it more cheaply.
We have to do it at scale. And it's a deterrent effect, right? It's just like we had nuclear missiles and the Soviets did. If China has them, we have to have them to make sure there's balance there and we can secure peace.
These things always scare me with regards to like big boats with lots of people on them, because it seems like it'd be really hard to stop a bunch of them coming at you. I guess we have to work on that.
That's what we're working on. I mean, Golden Dome is about missile defense; hypersonic is about making sure we have offense.
I love it. The sixth one actually was scaled directed energy. I've obviously worked with Epirus and others on this. This is a big area.
Yeah, it's a big area because with the explosion of drones, how do you take them down? You can take them down with high-powered microwave like Epirus. You could take them down with lasers.
Jewish space lasers! Israel—you can't say that. Space—just joking.
You could take them down with lasers. You could take them down with some other electronic warfare methods, cyber attacks, and so on. But it's a real thing. We've got big events coming in this country just next year: you've got World Cup, you've got USA 250 in '26, in '28 you've got the Olympics.
We got to protect these places.
We got to protect these places and the border, drug drones coming over the border.
