We Americans have long believed that the US military is the most advanced and most capable in the world. But in some respects that’s no longer the case. For example, China’s new, nuclear-armed hypersonic missiles could destroy in an instant the USS Gerald R. Ford, the US Navy’s most sophisticated aircraft carrier. And it goes without saying that any other surface ship would be vulnerable, too. Similarly, ever more capable drones are proving hazardous to America’s most advanced battlefield weapons in Ukraine. And artificial intelligence will only multiply these and other threats. Meanwhile, the Pentagon takes years to identify the urgent needs of its soldiers, sailors, and airmen, much less deliver new technologies to meet them. That’s the backstory in Unit X, Raj M. Shah and Christopher Kirchhoff’s outstanding account of their work reforming the Pentagon and dragging the US military into the 21st century.
Colossal levels of waste and inefficiency
Shah and Kirchhoff wrote this book to showcase the work of Defense Innovation Unit Experimental (DIUx), or Unit X for short, which they helped create in 2016 and ran during its first critical years. (The unit no longer is experimental.) They do so admirably, with abundant examples of the devious new technologies they helped identify and develop in Silicon Valley and sell to US military commanders. But for me what stands out even more in this book are the jaw-dropping delays, cost overruns, arcane rules, inter-service rivalries, and sometimes petty jealousies that get in the way of supplying US soldiers, sailors, and airmen with what they need to protect their lives and those of civilians in war zones. No doubt you’ve heard for years about waste in the Pentagon. Well, it’s all true. And it’s even worse than I’d thought.
Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley Are Transforming the Future of War by Raj M. Shah and Christopher Kirchhoff (2024) 320 pages ★★★★★
A brilliant example of the need
The book opens with a brilliant example of the dilemma that brought Shah and Kirchhoff together in Unit X. It was 2006, and Shah was a twenty-seven-year-old US Air Force captain piloting an F-16 fighter jet along the border between Iraq and Iran. All of a sudden, he realized he couldn’t tell which side of the border he was on. He was in trouble. Fortunately, as it turned out, he hadn’t strayed into Iranian airspace. But he might have become the target of the country’s robust air defense system and probably shot down.
On a second flight, Shah took along a GPS-equipped computer tablet, which he strapped to his thigh. “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,” he writes. And that experience, among many others, led him and Kirchhoff to understand that Silicon Valley was leagues ahead of the legacy military contractors baked into the Pentagon’s weapons acquisition system.
Reforming the Pentagon
“Our mission at DIUx,” they write, “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.” And the need to shake up the Pentagon was widely acknowledged within its halls.
“By the time we were recruited to DIUx, it was an open secret inside the Pentagon that if the U.S. went to war with China, we’d lose far more soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen than our war plans anticipated. We might very well suffer an outright defeat, ending the era of American supremacy that began at the Second World War’s end.” In the final analysis, their work at Unit X may have slightly—very slightly—reduced those daunting odds.
Strengths and weaknesses
This book demonstrates both the strengths and the weaknesses of a first-person account. On the plus side, since the principal actors weigh in, they’re writing from direct experience. And they know personally the other people who enter into their story. On the negative side, they could be exaggerating their accomplishments and reporting on events that other credible actors might view differently. But in their defense, especially in a closing chapter, they minimize the impact of their work at Unit X, concluding that the Pentagon has a long, long way to go before it fully incorporates the lessons they sought to teach.
About the authors
Raj M. Shah was the managing partner of the “Unit X” of the book’s title. Reporting directly to the Secretary of Defense, he led the unit’s small staff in marrying new technology generated in Silicon Valley not just to the armed forces at large but to fighting men and women in the field. Shah flew an F-16 fighter bomber in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan and remains in the USAF Reserve. Previously, he was a successful tech entrepreneur. He now serves as cofounder and managing partner of Shield Capital, a venture capital fund focused on companies that operate both commercially and serving the armed forces. Shah holds an AB from Princeton University and an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
Christopher Kirchhoff describes himself as “an expert in emerging technology.” Recently, he worked on special projects at the leading AI firm Anthropic. With Raj M. Shah, he previous led Unit X, the Pentagon’s Silicon Valley office. Before that, he had held top-level positions in the Obama White House and as an adviser to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as well as the CEO of Google. Kirchhoff studied history and science at Harvard College and later earned a doctorate in politics from Cambridge University. He lives with his husband John in San Francisco.
For related reading
You’ll find this book among related titles at Top nonfiction books about national security and The 5 best books about Silicon Valley.
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