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

Emil Michael: So when I got here, there were 14 critical technology areas. So critical. critical to our national security. So I looked at them, I said, well, number one, if there's that many, they can't be critical. But #2, hard for people to hold in their head that many priorities and wake up every morning. knowing that they have to get up and execute against those priorities and make progress, because you get distracted, you get too much separation, and therefore not enough resource to any one thing. So I cut them down to six after studying, and I made it more action-oriented, so we put sprints behind them like you would in the engineering team.

Emil Michael: So we simplified it. and say, there's three sort of broad categories we're going to deploy it on. One is enterprise use cases, like any company would use it for efficiencies, right? The second is intelligence. We get a lot of intelligence from satellites, from all the things the United States does across the enterprise that previously used human analysts for. And so if you could improve the leverage of the human analyst by keying up to them, here's 10 things we saw that you should look at. Man, you're going to make that analyst way more efficient, right? And then, well, if I could take this type of intelligence and fuse it with this type of intelligence, I'm going to make that analyst really capable because usually one type of analyst looks at one type of intelligence. So the more data I can aggregate from all these sources, the more intelligence we can use, which is a great deterrent because we have the best intelligence collection in the world. And then third for war fighting. So war fighting is a complex sort of thing. You're doing war gaming, you're doing planning, you know, there's a lot of formalities and how you execute orders, how you simulate what might happen if you do different scenarios. So across those three areas, enterprise, intelligence, war gaming, we'll have a few pace setting projects within each of them.

Emil Michael: We're gonna change the way we buy, the way we do RFPs even. For an RFP, it used to be, here's a 300-page requirement document, please fill it out and we'll decide if you win or lost. Now we say, well, here's our problem, we're trying to achieve this. Why don't you come back to us with a solution and you allow them to come in with different ideas about how to solve the problem. And there's novel concepts out there. So it's a different, so the primes will excel at filling out a 300 page questionnaire. A startup won't. So if you change it into here's the problem I'm trying to solve, well, startup may say, oh, I have ways of solving this.

Emil Michael: In the 80s, there were 50 defense contractors and they got merged, so there were only about 5 now. So there's a lot of room for new entrants. And it's crazy to me that SpaceX, Anduril 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 people are not going to fight you. We're now excited about lower cost, faster, more sophisticated options.