“Hacking” the Pentagon to Unclog its Technological Arteries

BOOK REVIEW: UNIT X: HOW THE PENTAGON AND SILICON VALLEY ARE TRANSFORMING THE FUTURE OF WAR

By Raj M. Shah and Christopher Kirchhoff/Scribner

Reviewed by: Glenn S. Gerstell

The Reviewer — Cipher Brief Expert Glenn S. Gerstell is a Principal with the Cyber Initiatives Group and Senior Adviser at the Center for Strategic & International Studies.  He served as General Counsel of the National Security Agency and Central Security Service from 2015 to 2020 and writes and speaks about the intersection of technology, national security and privacy.

REVIEW — In October 2016, at the height of America’s air campaign against ISIS in Syria and Iraq, Defense Innovation Board members and the head of the new Defense Innovation Unit Experimental (DIUx) wanted to see how technology was helping the military’s mission and where improvements were needed. So, they visited the Combined Air Operations Center in Qatar, which controlled military flights in 21 countries from northeast Africa and the Middle East through Central and South Asia.

They didn’t like what they saw.

Arguably already out of date when the center opened in 2003, the CAOC’s technology had remained mostly unchanged in the ensuing 13 years – several lifetimes in technology cycles. Shockingly, the complex task of dispatching tankers for aerial refueling of fighter jets, transport planes and other aircraft – a task where minutes if not seconds made a critical difference – was handled by airmen hunched over laptops running older versions of Windows, having figures read out loud to them from other airmen whose computers couldn’t communicate with the first group, with the overall results displayed on magnetic pucks on a giant whiteboard, manually moved by a third group of airmen. Since the system couldn’t possibly keep up with the dynamic pace of combat, weather and other factors affecting over 1,500 flights a day, the CAOC was often forced, as a safety matter, to order the launch of a single tanker just to make one refueling – a wildly inefficient and expensive operation.

Northrup Grumman was in the eighth year of ten-year overhaul intended to address the problem, but it was – like so many Pentagon programs – over budget and delayed. Everyone knew what was needed, and the commercial technology was readily at hand, but there was literally no way to deploy a quick fix.

This was precisely the type of problem the Defense Innovation Board was intended to identify and the DIUx was intended to solve. And they did: the DIUx put together a team of software coders, figured out precisely what was needed from the airmen at the CAOC, and built and deployed in six months an app that electronically handled all command and coordination of the CAOC’s aerial refueling mission.

This was the first, and highly successful, demonstration of the capability of the DIUx, which had been set up by Secretary of Defense Ash Carter just months before. The story of how DIUx was founded and how it overcame obstacles to blaze a trail for the entire Department of Defense to follow in seizing the benefits of American innovation and technology is told in Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley are Transforming the Future of War, by Raj Shah and Christopher Kirchhoff.


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Shah, a former Air Force fighter pilot and cybersecurity entrepreneur, and Kirchhoff, a Harvard PhD who served as the technology strategist for the National Security Council, were asked by Carter in 2016 to take over a newly revitalized effort to transform the way the Pentagon approached commercial technology. The effort was embodied in DIUx – half venture fund and half the Department’s embassy to Silicon Valley – and was housed at Moffett Field, a decommissioned naval air station in Mountain View, across the fence from Google’s campus. In the authors’ view, DIUx had to address a dire disconnect between the military and commercial technology:

The US had fallen dangerously behind its rivals when it came to technology….How did the country with the largest economy and most innovative technology companies fall so far behind?

Quite simply, sometime in the 1990s, Silicon Valley and the Pentagon stopped talking to each other….

For its part, the Valley had soured on doing business with the Pentagon. Startups didn’t need the headache of dealing with a customer that took years to close a sale and then even more years to start using the product and paying for it. Too often, promising products were abandoned in their journey to the battlefield….Moreover, many engineers and technologists in Silicon Valley had deep moral objections to creating products that might be used to kill people, and they demanded their companies refuse to sign contracts with the military or intelligence agencies.

Thanks to Carter’s recognition that the existing structures within the Defense Department would be inadequate to solve the problem, he arranged for Shah and Kirchhoff to report directly to him and to have the power to cut through the Department’s notorious red tape, including by waiving procurement regulations that might otherwise impede them.

As the authors explain, their structure and privileges enabled them to bypass lengthy acquisition procedures and to get contracts awarded quickly to small but innovative Silicon Valley companies that could rapidly create just the technological solutions the military needed. Their objective at DIUx “wasn’t just to find hardware and software so military units around the world could better perform their mission. It was to disrupt and transform the culture of the largest and possibly most bureaucratic organization in the world by infusing its clogged arteries with the nimble, agile DNA of Silicon Valley — in other words to hack the Pentagon.”

To do that, DIUx would need to go out into the field and find out exactly what the warfighter customers needed and award a relatively small contract to solve that particular problem. That was a big change. Under the traditional method, Pentagon brass would decide what capabilities they would like to have in concept, a prime defense contractor would be brought in to develop a pilot project, which would then be refined and added to, typically resulting in an over-developed, over-budget product, already out-of-date when placed in the field years later. Study after study has shown the cost of this approach, in both dollars and loss of technological advantage, yet it seems impervious to change. The engrained Pentagon bureaucracy, the internal incentives, the entrenched prime defense contractors, the members of Congress who want big contracts awarded to their districts, and the Congressional staff members themselves who relish wielding secret and largely unchecked power over Pentagon budgets – all contribute to an acquisition process that ill-serves the taxpayers and the men and women in uniform.


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The book is at its best in revealing this pathology by telling the predictable yet fascinating tale of how the DIUx team would vanquish a problem – such as deploying synthetic aperture radar sensors on small satellites to detect North Korean missiles – only to find their path blocked by some general whose long-running work would be obviated by a DIUx solution or by congressional appropriations staff who saw a DIUx success as a zero-sum game endangering one of their pet projects. The authors’ easy style recreates dialog at meetings and gives the reader a good feel for the ups and downs of navigating the personalities and dynamics of the Pentagon and Congress.

The second half of the book tracks the progress of DIUx less closely, widening the focus to examine the role of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence and various technology innovations in the Defense Department. With discussions of the threats posed by China, illustrations of how rapid technological innovation transforms the Ukraine battlefield, and the venture capital endeavors of Shah and Kirchhoff after leaving DIUx, this latter portion is informative but lacking in the excitement and urgency of the tale of the startup DIUx. Shah even adds five pages of his policy proposals for increasing American military readiness, including calls for mandatory national service, expanding the role of ROTC and National Guard and fixing our immigration system – all good ideas to be sure, but hardly novel. Yet the broader issue of transforming the overall defense acquisition regime isn’t addressed beyond the diffuse need to tighten procurement cycles and suffuse the Pentagon with more of a Silicon Valley mentality. The reader wishes for more insight in this area — an area where the authors have compelling experience.  So it’s not clear if the book’s subtitle is descriptive or aspirational.

It’s undoubtedly true that the Pentagon has come a long way from the manual whiteboard days at the CAOC, with innovations ranging from the already established Army Futures Command and the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office to the proposed Joint All-Domain Command and Control system. And the first National Defense Industrial Strategy, issued at the beginning of this year, explicitly recognized acquisition flexibility as goal. Unfortunately, these innovations still seem the exception, rather than the rule. There’s relatively little sign that the Department has moved away from a sclerotic approach of acquiring major weapons systems from prime contractors. To be sure, no one is suggesting a Silicon Valley startup is going to produce a Gerald R. Ford-class nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. But – as former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Mark Milley and former Defense Innovation Board head Eric Schmidt just warned — maybe we should be focusing more on the cheaper AI-controlled drones from China that just might overwhelm US forces in some future conflict. Unit X is pointing us in the right direction.

Unit X earns a prestigious 4 out of 4 trench coats

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