The American public is probably not as aware of the threat environment. The explosion of drones, electronic warfare methods, cyber attacks, modern sensing. Hypersonics are a different threat all together. The AI stuff's for real. With AI coming, you can automate human thought. You're going to have swarms of agents that can communicate and think and instantiate normal and learn and have total recall. The reason we're going to win in whatever domain it is is that we're crazy. Even we don't know what we're going to do when we get punched in the face, and I think that's actually quality. AI is a threat, but not in the way you've been led to believe. It's not going to lead to mass unemployment or any of the other hysteria you've been hearing about, but it is going to fundamentally change how the defense world works and how warfare is fought. Thankfully, we have some of the best on our side preparing and protecting us. Starting with Kevin Mandia, AI cyber GI Joe. Shyam Sankar, who built Palantir over many years, providing the good guys with the most lethal tools available. And Emil Michael, who's working full-time inside the Pentagon as under secretary, running our research and engineering into the most important technologies to allow us to achieve peace through strength.
I have to ask you about some of these like magical AI weapons that we're using right now. I know you can't tell us everything, but this has been interesting to watch the war from afar. What are you allowed to tell us about how these things work?
Unfortunately, not a huge amount, but I think what you could say there's a way in which there's nothing new under the sun. It's just the OODA loop. You know, John Boyd's observe, orient, decide, act. And whichever side is able to go through the OODA loop fastest is the side that's going to win. And so, you can think about the application of AI to the kill chain targeting process as about providing an advantage to cut through the fog of war and to be able to apply effects to your adversary before they understand even what's happening and respond to it. A way of tying national intent to the targeting and fires process. And I would say it's a leapfrog in capability, but I think it also shows that there is another 10x, 100x to go that's illuminated by what's already been done here.
So as AI improves and as the infrastructure improves, we can actually do an even much better job next couple years.
Sorry to me, it's better not screw with us.
That's deterrence and that's the whole point.
That is the whole point. Let's look ahead. The clash between Anthropic and the Pentagon over the cutting edge AI is obviously a preview of some of these kind of tough questions. You can imagine AI is 100 times better and there's people working on it and there's interesting questions around like what you want the government to do or not. You have obviously some of the very best minds in the private sector these days working on this. It used to be those best minds were in the government. So it's like it's kind of more aligned like how is this dynamic going to function when the best minds are outside the government but then having to work with it and might have different opinions about things.
Well, one of the things I really hoped helping stand up to attachment 2.01, you know, how do we build more of a bridge between Silicon Valley and the Department?
So attachment 2.01 is this is what you're serving and it's a lieutenant colonel.
That's correct. Yeah. And I think part of it is like we have to walk many miles in each other's shoes to understand these things. You know, I think there's a lot of historical analogs that suggest if you really believe in democracy, you need people making these decisions who are accountable to the American people. They're elected or appointed and accountable to elected officials. If you go back, the analog I like historically is thinking about Theodore Hall. Theodore Hall is one of the youngest scientists in the Manhattan Project. He joined the project at 18 years old right out of Harvard, genius physicist. He had an older brother Edward Hall who was actually the inventor of the Minuteman missile. But you know, there were two types of traitors in the Manhattan Project. There were those who were committed communists like Klaus Fuchs, always a spy, got him to the program. Theodore was not that sort of traitor. He was naive. Theodore thought, 'Look, I'm a genius at physics, so I must be a genius at geopolitics.' And in his conception of the world, the only way to have world peace was for two countries to have the bomb. So, without any penchant for communism or even ill will towards America, he thought this was his moral duty was to walk into the Soviet trade mission in New York in 1944 and give them secrets to the bomb. But, what happened was not world peace. Every death since 1949 from communism, which is the year the Soviets got the bomb, you could say that blood is at least partially on Theodore Hall's hands. And so, I think we live in a world where many smart people struggle with epistemic humility. What are the limits of my knowledge? How do I have some humility around that? You know, because the alternative, you could say Theodore Hall was essentially tyranny by tech bro. You know, he decided global policy and it had huge consequences. On the other hand, there's a true deep commitment to democracy even when it feels uncomfortable.
How do you think about the future of warfare with AI and like prosecuting war without humans in the loop? I mean, obviously, there's things where right now, you're like if something's incoming, you're going to want the AI to target it and destroy it for you. And I'm learning a little bit about this from Saronic and other companies I'm involved in. If you have hundreds of ships having a war and China has hundreds of ships and they're reacting in real time with AI, you're probably going to want to react in real time with AI, too, and you're going to probably want to give more leeway in response in order to beat them. Like, there's ways you have to use AI there. And then, it goes kind of higher and higher up like for targeting, for example, and at what point should human not be in a loop or not in a loop? And it's interesting because Congress probably has some opinions on this and they're trying to figure out how to regulate it. And like, obviously, you know, we're probably not ready for AI to be making certain high-level decisions, but there's other ones they have to make or we lose. And like how do you see this?
Yeah, well, I think there's a lot of complexity and nuance to the issue and you have to kind of slice it in layers. First of all, we've had autonomous weapons since the '70s and '80s. You know, you think about like the Aegis system that defends a carrier. When it senses an incoming threat coming at the speed of a missile, it's firing off to protect the ship. And you don't have the time for a human to do many of these. Wouldn't make sense for a person to have to say yes the ship's already hit. Yeah, exactly. Then you can kind of even look at something like a weapon that you fire from a fighter jet. Well, it's your radar system that's telling you that it's detecting an adversary. And you as a human have weapons release, but then it's also the guidance system that's going and closing that kill chain. So there's a lot of this that's actually happening already by computer. So I would posit that this is more of a difference of degree than kind. And because we're miscategorizing it as a total difference of kind, we kind of have some deranged conversations around it. And so we need to have a risk-based decision of like what is the risk to our force? You know, nobody is trying to jump the shark and have killer robots. It's really like how do we have something that doesn't advantage the adversary's OODA loop over ours and mean that we're showing up to a gun fight with a knife. And so you have to measure the risk as you go and I think you're going to have to feel your way through that, right? And I think much to the department's credit, they want the frontier labs, they want everyone who's really smart about this to have a seat at the table and to help work through it together, but recognizing that like policy has to be set by policy makers.
To play devil's advocate because I 100% agree with what you said and I 100% agree we have to stay ahead of our adversaries and use AI for these things. To play devil's advocate, there's some people on the outside don't know this stuff as well. They see maybe there's some character inside of the Department of War who builds a program that does create some kind of thing that you might call a killer robot and maybe breaks the rules and then all of a sudden you have something that is very scary and causing problems. I mean, it sounds ridiculous when I say it, but people are worried about this. Like how what should we be talking about it? Like how are we going to protect people not for this not to happen?
Well, if you're concerned about that, like why aren't you worried that someone in a garage is going to create a killer robot? You know, I think the probability of that happening is really no different. So then that becomes almost like a technical question, not a matter of will. You know, it's just not how weapon systems are developed. Like, you know, you'd have to believe that there's a conspiracy where a rogue actor can go do something like this in an organization the size of the department. And I think it fundamentally underestimates the moral fiber of people who are in our uniform services. Like, these are people who take the law incredibly seriously, who work very diligently, who have put their lives on the line to defend the nation, to defend all of us. And I think we owe them the benefit of the doubt in this capacity here.
Yeah, we trust the bureaucracy to stop crazy things from happening in some ways, which is ironic, but it's true. I guess yeah, I've always...
I trust people. You know, it's not the faceless bureaucracy that I'm trusting. It's like, these are Americans. These are exceptional human beings. They care about what they're doing. This is their craft. They're not yoloing it. You know, if you have some cartoon caricature of who they are, okay, fine. Maybe from the degeneracy of the last 30 years of media that always paints the ultimate bad guy as the corrupt bureaucrat or the corrupt military official, but that's not reality. And I think they deserve more from us.
Yeah, I think like a random PhD student in a garage is probably more dangerous with AI than anyone in these that we were serving with in the Department of Foreign Affairs.
Yeah, and you know, it's actually interesting taking the other side of that. It does seem like recent wars, thanks to AI, thanks to new technologies, are actually a lot safer. Like, a lot less death. Is that a trend you'd hope we should Are we going to see that going forward where hopefully Americans lose a lot less lives based on the technology?
Yes and no. So, yes in the sense that like yes, this is an empirical trend. I think 70 million people died in World War from all causes and effects. You know, that's not even a quantity we can contemplate today. You know, like hundreds is we struggle with, right? The part that's no is like the part I don't buy the idea that these sorts of robotic weapons are going to somehow mean that humans don't have to do the fighting. You certainly want the robots to draw first blood. You want them to serve as a deterrent, but the will of the nation to actually win and prevail in these consequences is always going to come down to brave humans willing to put themselves in harm's way when the moment calls for it in order to prevail. So, it shouldn't let us off the hook of the moral weight and the consequence of what it means to actually fight a war, which is why we're a peace-loving nation who does not want to fight a war. We want to prevent the wars from happening. We want to prevent adversaries from having so much leverage over us like a nuclear bomb that actually peace is no longer possible.
And you made some pretty big announcements. You know, 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 got to have to like narrow things down and focus. And I noticed on the critical technologies list, there were like at least 14 before. You've chosen six of those you've announced that are now the real critical focus. So, tell us about these.
Yeah, so Congress said, you know, wrote in legislation that I as the CT 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 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 2025, 2026 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, 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 we're in, 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 because I wrote them down myself because I wouldn't have remembered all of them. Of course, I would have because I'm 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 one was just getting everyone the basic access to AI so they could get familiar using it and understanding it. Then we're going to do it then I would say 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 sort of get more, you know, analyze more with less but using computers effectively. And then war fighting, which is logistical planning, modeling and simulation, all things that go into a battle management.
Command and control has to obviously be AI. I know Anduril and 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 other six that we have companies like Galvion working on that. Is it a big focus of yours then to kind of fix that?
Yeah, because the 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 military base. And if there's ever a conflict in the Pacific, we'll by definition be remote and frankly probably the most remote place you could imagine. And 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 how do we what technologies are we going to use to enable our war fighters 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 I mean, you know biology could do a lot of things. Biological organisms could separate rare earth metals. Biological organisms can create TNT, gunpowder, you know, energetics if you will. Biological materials can create materials that you could like fix aircraft with and all kinds of things.
We have a company Cambium as with special heat shielding. We're actually the best heat shielding in the world using a bio manufacturing technique, right? So, there's some fun stuff there.
Right, so fun stuff. And we've been behind again because some of our adversaries have been dumping like 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 broader the industrial base in America broadly speaking.
And you guys have a new office of biotechnologies. You're taking it seriously. Some good stuff there.
Another one is interesting. You said Is it called quantum and battlefield information dominance? Like why is quantum in that one?
Quantum is because, you know, people think about quantum, they 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. Like you'll 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're the only country that really had a satellite lost satellite capabilities.
Include the part of electronic warfare of turning on and off sensors and interference and that kind of stuff?
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? This is a big issue because I know a lot of our old stuff was just so expensive. It doesn't scale. And then scaled hypersonics. I think that speaks for itself. That's a hard one. That's a hard one.
So, high scaled hypersonics and scaled directed energy. So, the technology's there. We understand how to do hypersonics. Hypersonic missile is hypersonics 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 sort of 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 hypersonics, but they're not the same thing as hypersonics because even though they're going really fast, they're not maneuverable.
Not maneuverable, but they're not going at hypersonic speeds also.
Even when they're reentering.
Even when they're re- Frankly, in reentering, they slow down because of the air.
That's why we take them out when they're up there.
Yeah. But, these other ones are much, much harder to deal with.
Much, much harder to deal with. So, we know how to build our own, but we have to do it more cheaply. We have to do it at scale. We have to do it and it's a deterrent effect, right? It's just like we had nuclear missiles and the Russians did or Soviets did. If China has them, we have to have them to make sure there's balance there and we can secure peace.
Always scare me with regards to like big boats with lots of people on them because it seems like it'd be really hard just 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. Hypersonics is about making sure we have offense.
I love it. Let's talk and let's say this one actually was scale 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-power microwave like Epirus. You can take them down with lasers.
[laughter] Israel You can't say that.
With space lasers? I'm just joking.
Um [laughter] you can take them down with lasers. You can take them down with you know, some other electronic warfare methods, cyber attacks, 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 250 USA in '28. You've got the Olympics.
Got to protect these things.
We got to protect these places and the border. You know, drug drones coming over the border.
When I helped my friend start Epirus, that's what I was thinking actually is what could a crazy terrorist do to like attack something in a stadium and you actually do need just to be able to turn these things off cheaply and affordably.
And now that they're mass produced because of the Ukraine-Russia war, it sound like the technology is...
It's actually scarier now because now because we're thinking about this 8 years ago, now it's like much cheaper to do this kind of attack and so we got to stop it. So well, thank you for being on top of that to protect us. You know, speaking of that, you mentioned Golden Dome. I want to dig one more step deeper on that. I think this is a pretty big deal. Iron Dome was actually a major major accomplishment. It's extraordinary that Israel was not wiped out a lot more by the insane amount of things shot at it. It's obviously America and Israel worked together on that. So the idea from President Trump is to do this for our homeland now, right? In a much bigger way.
Yeah, in a much bigger way because we have bigger territory, obviously. We have also more sophisticated adversaries. So their weaponry is more sophisticated. So it's a layered approach. It's can you you're going to use space, ground, and sort of the under layer to make sure that you can get any attack from a boat, from a boat that might attack, or nuclear missile, conventional missile.
North Korea all of a sudden were to shoot a few things or something, like we need to be able to know we can take those out.
North Korea, Iran, Russia, China.
Right? And we're a big homeland.
We do. There's a lot to protect. There's a lot to protect. And this is where we're going as fast as we can here. I mean, a lot of this stuff traditionally takes a decade. How do you go faster than that for some of these things?
You know, so you can't but because and this is the thing I love about my role, it says research and engineering, but that doesn't mean it's in the lab. That means it's I can take stuff that's almost ready and push it faster forward. And so it spans the whole gamut from deep science at DARPA that's reporting into me and what new companies are doing like Anduril and Palantir and so on and how do you push those things to the edge to make them more capable. And so you'd be surprised at what we could do on anti-missile defense if we then deploy it we if we deploy it. You have to have a defense industrial base that supports that. And we do have to have some new technologies. We just did a RFI for space-based interceptors, which is how do you put something in space.
It's a big deal going down in space.
That's a big down. I hope some good guys are helping you on that one.
You have all this stuff going on now with like changing how the Pentagon works, right? I think you guys worked a lot. The Secretary of War came out It must have been a few Fridays ago now. It was last month. And it's you're reorganizing how you're working in a bunch of different ways. One of the ways...
So you're going more commercial first, rather than just instinctively working with the primes. You want to see what is already out there. How do you culturally get people to do that? Because it's a big change for this place. I'm sure some places are still just doing the same thing. How do you as leaders shift it to these new directives?
Yeah, it's a great question. And this goes back to one of your first questions, like why now? It's because you have disruptive thinking in both the president and secretary. We have the aperture now to say, 'What do we do? How do we? We have to do it different.' And one of the examples I use, I use Palantir and Anduril and SpaceX. All had to sue the government for their first big contract because the primes were sophisticated at selling, sophisticated at protecting their interests.
