AI and the Future of Warfare with US Under Secretary of War Emil Michael

Military buildup in China is the biggest military buildup in world history, and so there's a real urgency on our side to ensure that we are ahead, but we stay ahead. And that's gonna take a different level of investment and different type of thinking than we've had in the last twenty years. In the eighties, there were 50 defense contractors, and they've got merged, so they're only about five. There's a lot of room for new entrants. It's crazy to me that SpaceX and ANROL and Palantir all had to sue the Department of War for their first contract. So the idea is you don't have to sue anymore. Come through the front door because no one's people are not gonna fight you. We're now excited about lower cost, faster, more sophisticated options. Hi, listeners. Welcome back to NoCriers. We're here today with Emil Michael, the former chief business officer of Uber, White House fellow, and currently CTO of the Department of War. Emil, thanks for joining us. Welcome, to Priors. Good to see you guys. It's It's been a long time. Congratulations on the new role. Very exciting news. Could you describe a little bit more about what that role is and what's changed at the Department of War to sort of create this new this new, role, this new momentum, new initiatives that you all are focused on? Yeah. So, for a long time at the Department of War, there was one organization called, Acquisition Technology and Logistics. It was all bunched up into one thing. And then about eight years ago, they said, well, tech is moving faster on new kinds of weaponry and defense systems than on the old system. So we're gonna split out acquisition from research and engineering, they call it. So I'm the undersecretary for research and engineering, which is cool. Right? Because I get to work on the stuff that I used to work on where I was in Silicon Valley, like, with work with entrepreneurs, work with new companies. I'm now responsible for DARPA, which is obviously super cool because it's most some of the most advanced research that happens in the country, if not the world. In the last few months, I took over as chief AI the chief AI office in the Department of War, which were 3,000,000 employees, the biggest organization with the biggest budget in the world, you know, is is not a small thing to to think about how to do AI right for. And then the Defense Innovation Unit, which is actually based in Mountain View, And it's supposedly the it's supposed to be the link between the fence industry and, you know, the startup community that's building commercial products and may have dual use. And then last is the strategic capability offices, which takes kind of existing, systems and tries to modify them in strategic ways or supplement them to get, you know, for strategic surprise, they call it. So all that all …