Unit X explores US military's shift to Silicon Valley tech for defence

Unit X offers a fascinating account of America's efforts to stay ahead in a rapidly shifting geopolitical landscape

Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley are transforming the future of war 

Author: Raj M Shah & Christopher Kirchhoff

Publisher:Simon & Schuster

Pages: 300

Price: Rs 1,199

The biggest wars of the century gone by were won more by the side with greater industrial capability and technological excellence than those with larger populations or greater mineral wealth. During World War II, the United Kingdom (UK), United States of America (USA) and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) diverted almost their entire research, development and manufacturing capability to the industrial scale production of combat equipment, establishing what came to be known as “total war economies”. Even women left the homestead to work full-time at assembling weapons, equipment and ammunition, as illustrated by posters of “Rosie the Riveter” — the American housewife working heroically on the factory floor. Practically every organ of these governments coordinated its efforts towards producing war materials as a result of which the US alone built over 150 combat aircraft and a large warship every day.

Today, the global geostrategic arena is witnessing a different churn as America, still the world’s biggest superpower, seeks to contain a fast-rising rival, China. Beijing has recently ordered all commercial firms within its borders to make their research and technology available for military exploitation. To marshal comparable assets, the US government has to strengthen the relationship between the US Department of Defense (the Pentagon) and the US private industry, especially the computer hardware and software hub in California known as Silicon Valley. This book tells us how the US managed to achieve this.

The book’s two authors are: Raj M Shah, (Raj) who started out as an F-16 fighter pilot in the US National Guard before becoming a serial technology entrepreneur; and Christopher Kirchhoff (Chris), a Harvard- and Cambridge-educated specialist in emerging technologies. They formed an excellent twosome: “Raj was a tech guy who knew about national security. Chris was a national security guy who understood tech.”

Raj first experienced the gap between technology, as it is provided to military users, and how it is actually used by combat units in the field. Two weeks into his first combat tour of Iraq in 2006, Raj was flying an F-16 fighter, in pitch darkness, along the Iraq-Iran border, when he realised that he couldn’t discern which side of the border he was on. His F-16 was an aerodynamic marvel that could outfly practically any adversary in the sky. However, its outdated navigation system couldn’t trace the aircraft’s location on a digital map, running the risk of an international incident. With no way to update the navigation software, Raj hacked into his own avionics. He took a Compaq iPAQ, a handheld device for checking email, loaded it with civilian navigation software and strapped it to his knee when he flew. In Raj’s own words, “The software in that little $300 gadget did a better job of telling him where he was than the system in a $30 million jet.”

The central message of the book is: The days of technology “trickle down” are over, when the frontlines of science and technology were drawn in military and space laboratories and their usage was then extended to civilian derivatives and products. Today, new technologies mostly germinate in small civilian start-ups, and their usage is then extended to military products. The author finds that most Americans remain unaware that their military’s advantage in weapons technology has been largely eclipsed by the commercial systems that more innovative adversaries, such as the Chinese, are likely to field in battle.

It took Raj and Chris an extended banging of heads against the Pentagon bureaucracy before they managed to convince the Department of Defense of the need to set up a unit that would be charged with bringing Silicon Valley’s cutting-edge technology to America’s military. The idea eventually drew the attention of the technology-friendly Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter, who personally drove the policy that established this system. The system that was set up was called the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU). Dramatically, it took on the name of Unit X.

The DIU first had to overcome the Pentagon’s prickly relationship with Silicon Valley, which had long been encumbered by slow-moving processes that acted as a brake on innovation. Unit X was specifically designed as a bridge to Silicon Valley technologists that would accelerate the bringing of state-of-the-art software and hardware to the battle space. Given the authority to cut through red tape and to function almost as a venture capital firm, Raj, Chris and those who followed them were tasked specifically  with meeting immediate military needs with technology from Valley startups rather than from the so-called “primes”— aerospace and defence behemoths like Lockheed, Raytheon, and Boeing.

Raj and Chris describe being dumbstruck by the speed at which cheap, modern technology, such as low-cost drones, were changing the calculus in combat. Raj’s F-16 fighter was designed to take on Russian MiGs. In a one-to-one aerial confrontation today, the F-16 pilot would probably shoot down the MiG and return safely. However, as Ukraine demonstrated in September 2023 in an attack on Russia’s air base at Pskov, cheap, kamikaze drones can easily strike and get away because modern fighters have no weapons designed to shoot down small drones.

America’s arsenal, fast-tracked by the DIU, is transforming how war is fought. Drones that can fly into buildings and map their interiors, micro-satellites that can see through clouds, and battle command centres powered by artificial intelligence: This book fascinatingly describes American efforts to remain the top dog in a fast-changing geopolitical landscape.