Unit X

Raj Shah and Christopher Kirchhoff led the Defense Innovation Unit, established in Silicon Valley to bring commercial technology into American military use, and this is their account of that work.

The institutional problem they describe is that the Pentagon's acquisition system was built to procure large weapons platforms over decades from a small set of established contractors, and that this system cannot buy commercial software or hardware that changes annually. They document the specific obstacles: contracting timelines longer than a start-up's runway, intellectual property terms that commercial firms will not accept, security clearance requirements, and a culture in which programme managers are not rewarded for adopting outside technology. Their principal instrument was the Other Transaction Authority, a contracting mechanism that allowed agreements to be reached in weeks rather than years.

The cases they cover include commercial satellite imagery, autonomous systems, cyber security tools, and the use of commercial software in operations. They also cover the political resistance, both from the established contractors and from parts of the Pentagon, and the difficulty of sustaining the unit through changes of administration. The Ukraine war, in which commercial satellite imagery and communications proved decisive, appears as vindication. The authors are advocates for the approach they built and the book is a case for it. Its account of why large procurement systems cannot buy fast-moving technology is the transferable content.