Raj M. Shah is co-founder and Managing Partner of Shield Capital, an investment firm focused on technologies applicable to both the commercial and defense markets, and Chairman of Resilience, a cyber-security start-up.

Christopher Kirchhoff is an expert in emerging technology who founded the Pentagon’s Silicon Valley office and has led teams for President Obama, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and CEO of Google. This essay is an edited and adapted excerpt from a chapter of their latest book, Unit X (2024), published with the authors’ permission.
 

The conflict in Ukraine became the war that the U.S. Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) had envisioned, fought with drones, satellites, and artificial intelligence, hackers on both sides launching cyberattacks, and Ukrainian citizens using smartphone apps to alert their military to enemy positions. It’s a hybrid war, with legacy technology like tanks and artillery used in combination with a digital overlay.

 

Capella Space, the satellite company we had wanted to surveil North Korea, now was flying a constellation of satellites and observed the Russian invasion as it began to unfold. Payam Banazadeh, Capella’s founder, had been busy since we’d seen him last. His company had almost gone bankrupt after we couldn’t deliver the full $50 million in Pentagon funds we’d promised. Despite that setback, Payam had persevered, as the best entrepreneurs do. By 2022, he’d built a thriving business, launching a constellation of seven synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellites and selling satellite data to commercial and government customers. Capella’s next-generation birds had mesh antennas 11 feet wide. They sent signals bouncing off earth’s surface that, once returned, resolved details smaller than 20 inches. That’s like seeing a basketball from 1,200 miles up, through any kind of weather, day or night.

The Ukrainian military operating a civilian-grade drone | Source: Shutterstock

 

Now, with war looming, the Department of Defense needed Capella more than ever. For weeks, Russian President Vladimir Putin had been amassing forces along Ukraine’s border. Tanks, infantry, missile batteries, and air assault units were arrayed in a 1,000-mile arc from Southern Belarus to the Black Sea. To many, it looked like the world’s most foolhardy bluff. Putin, already a pariah, was riding Russia’s economy into oblivion. Yet buoyed by rising oil prices and a new alliance with China, and with nationalist sentiments stoked at home, he threatened to invade Ukraine.

 

Putin started the job in 2014. Forces without military insignia flooded Crimea, which Russia then annexed. The conflict had smoldered ever since, and now Putin wanted more. There was a prolonged period during which he was thinking about it. And while that was going on, there was intense debate inside the national security community among people who followed Russia. Most believed that an invasion was a far-fetched possibility, but others thought Putin was so driven by his desire to reclaim old Soviet states that he might actually take the risk.

 

Capella satellites saw it happening in real time, and they suddenly became a powerful instrument in the U.S. campaign against Russian disinformation. “Putin kept saying, ‘I’m not going to invade,’” former DIU Director Mike Brown remembers. “He put out video of tanks being loaded on railcars, portraying them being sent back to Russia. But we knew he was actually amassing forces.” When Putin denied that Russia intended to invade, the Pentagon released a Capella image to CNN, and then U.S. President Joe Biden cited that image as proof that Putin was lying. “We were the first unclassified, open-source satellite imagery that showed the imminent invasion,” Payam recalls.

 

On February 24th, 2022, columns of Russian armor rolled across the border toward Kyiv. Cruise missiles slammed into Ukraine’s communication nodes, including the data center that powered Ukraine’s government operations. A massive cyberattack unfolded. Computer viruses targeted 48 Ukrainian agencies and enterprises. Airborne assault forces landed on airfields on the edges of Kyiv. Spetsnaz troops infiltrated the capital and almost succeeded in their mission to assassinate Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky. Russia’s military, which wields 5,889 nuclear warheads, was rolling west toward the NATO block, and Europe’s largest land war since World War II was playing out in real life. “It reminds me of NSC gallows humor,” Chris told Raj in a phone call. “Just when you think things can’t get worse, you realize how much of an idiot you are for thinking that.”

 

But then something extraordinary happened. What was supposed to have been a cakewalk by Russian forces quickly turned into a rout of those same forces. Troops that had planned to march in a Kyiv victory parade were now in retreat, taking heavy casualties as Ukraine forces pushed them back east. Part of the reason was that Ukraine was skillfully wielding commercial technology. In conventional weaponry, the Ukrainians were vastly outgunned. But their tech-savvy military had obtained an advantage by anticipating Russian moves and devising workarounds. When Russians jammed Ukrainian radios, Ukrainians switched to SpaceX Starlink Internet terminals provided by Elon Musk and Android phones to keep orders flowing from the Defense Ministry. On WhatsApp and Signal, citizens reported Russian troop movements. Ukrainian soldiers zipped cheap Chinese-made DJI drones over enemy lines to scout positions and direct artillery fire. They armed quadcopters with grenades, turning them into kamikazes. One DJI drone destroyed a Russian T-90 tank while another filmed the attack.

 

Soon, uncrewed small boats attacked Russian navy warships in the Black Sea. Ukraine’s Soviet-era surveillance drones, modified with explosives, shredded strategic bombers deep in Russia’s territory. Spotter teams in pickup trucks streaming video via Starlink racked up kills by the hour. Turkish Bayraktar TB2 rear-propeller drones slammed missiles into Russian convoys. “Welcome to hell,” the TB2’s 42-year-old designer, an MIT graduate, captioned a social media post showing the slaughter. Russia replied by blasting Ukrainian power stations with $20,000 Iranian-made kamikaze drones. Those drones gave Russia an asymmetrical advantage, as the only way for Ukraine to defeat them was to use Western-provided missiles that cost anywhere from $140,000 to $500,000 each. Illustrating how commercial technology levels the playing field for all, 82 percent of the Iranian drones’ components were made in the United States. It was all part of the “flatter world” that Chris had written about in 2016.

 

Silicon Valley tech companies leapt into the fray to support Ukraine. Planet Labs’ electro-optical satellites were surveilling the battlefield. HawkEye 360, a company Raj had invested in, intercepted Russian radio messages. Skydio, the first U.S. drone maker to become a unicorn, rushed its autonomous quadcopters to Ukraine infantry units. BlueHalo, mobilized by a $24 million Pentagon contract, delivered its Titan counter-drone systems to the battlefield, with antennas powered by machine learning algorithms. Palantir, developer of AI-powered data analytics software, sent engineers to Ukraine to help the Defense Ministry sift through huge amounts of intelligence information and draw conclusions from the data. Anduril deployed hardware and software systems, including its Ghost drone, a near-silent autonomous helicopter loaded with sensors. A DIU-backed company called Somewear Labs provided communications and mesh networking technology.

 

The big firms were in the thick of it as well. “I mean, they put the entire government on a Snowball,” Amazon’s suitcase-sized petabyte-hard drive, “and got it out of the country and into the cloud,” one DIU engineer said. Some 10 million gigabytes of tax, property records, banking, and other data were backed up. Microsoft’s rapid response team went on war footing too, working in tandem with U.S. Cyber Command to push patches that caused Russian malicious code to bounce back, like bullets off a tank.

 

Bay Area venture capitalists started getting requests for help buying drones, night-vision goggles, Kevlar vests, and other equipment for Ukrainian troops. Many wrote personal checks, organized shipments of gear, and shipped it by FedEx to the battlefield. People in the Valley who’d once pushed back against the idea of working with the military were now “thinking different,” to quote Apple’s famous mantra. The Project Maven controversy had turned some tech people away from the military, but now Ukraine had brought them back.

 

DIU Springs Into Action

The U.S. government turned out to be less nimble than the private sector in getting commercial tech to the front. Two months into the fighting, the U.S. and 40 of its allies met in Germany to plan how to provide military and economic assistance to Ukraine. The Pentagon created a new command, the Security Assistance Group–Ukraine, whose mission was to push supplies into the country. The Biden administration and Congress committed $16 billion in funds in the war’s initial months, some of that money to be spent on immediate shipments from stockpiles and the rest on contracts for new production. At DIU, leaders sprang into action. Jared Dunnmon, who led DIU’s artificial intelligence portfolio, became the DIU representative on a crucial Pentagon body, the Senior Integration Group-Ukraine (SIG-Ukraine), tasked with blasting through Pentagon bureaucratic blockers that could slow down the delivery of aid. It was a job tailor-made for DIU. Ukraine needed small drones to help aim artillery; DIU maintained a list of drone-makers that could supply them. Ukrainians were relying on noisy generators to power their Starlink terminals—the noise betraying their positions. DIU had a portfolio of energy companies that made long-duration batteries.

 

Even in a time of crisis, the Pentagon couldn’t get out of its own way, and the Ukraine conflict laid bare the cost of an acquisition apparatus built for the weapons systems of the Cold War. In an episode worthy of the novel Catch-22, SIG-Ukraine tried to buy and ship technology products using the Presidential Drawdown Authority (PDA), which enables the DoD to deliver equipment in days or even hours during emergencies. But the rules said you could only ship equipment that had already been purchased and stockpiled. So even though the DoD had standing contracts with the right technology companies, there was no ready mechanism to ship over the arsenal of new weapons and capabilities DIU had developed over its seven-year existence.

 

Other absurdities involved data. When commercial satellite companies like Capella transmitted images to the DoD through military networks, they technically became classified “NOFORN,” meaning they couldn’t be released to foreign nations. Even though these images were completely open source—some were playing on CNN—from the DoD’s point of view, the images couldn’t be automatically released to Ukraine. “Our team couldn’t share the data,” Dunnmon says. “It was ridiculous.” Pentagon lawyers exacerbated the absurdity by claiming that commercial satellite images might contain “personally identifiable information,” in which case sharing them with the Ukrainian military might violate U.S. privacy laws.

 

“Where is that coming from?” Chris asked a DIU official.

“In this case it’s coming from the privacy and civil liberties people.” 

“Well, they should try living in Ukraine,” Chris replied.

 

It was a problem of system misalignment. The actual capabilities driving the future of war had eclipsed what the Pentagon’s system of security assistance could deliver. In the first 18 months of the invasion, the U.S. provided $41 billion in military aid to Ukraine, with others contributing another $13 billion. But Ukraine’s requests for advanced commercial technology often slipped through the gaps. One of the first tranches of aid contained an order for communication units made by Somewear Labs. These were little backpack-sized devices that the National Guard uses to set up networks when responding to a crisis. For reasons no one could explain, the order got lost in the system. Dunnmon spent days pestering people at the Pentagon and at U.S. European Command in Stuttgart, Germany, which was managing shipments. They had no idea what he was talking about. After days of back-and-forth, Dunnmon flew to Stuttgart and spent five hours in the EUCOM headquarters digging out the line item for the Somewear units from where it was buried in a budget spreadsheet.

 

“The acquisition system is built for supplying Patriot missile batteries in five years. It’s not built for supplying a drone tomorrow,” Dunnmon says. “The amount of effort that had to go into just getting routine things done was disheartening in a lot of ways.” Given the context, it wasn’t just frustrating—it was terrifying. Soldiers and civilians were dying. While many things went right in arming the Ukrainians, we couldn’t get some of the most important commercial equipment to the front. Worse, we were getting a glimpse of how our military might perform if the U.S. were to go to war, and it didn’t inspire confidence.

 

Techno-Guerrillas

The day after the invasion, Andrey Liscovich, a Ukrainian-born tech executive, flew from San Francisco to the Warsaw airport then made his way overland to his hometown of Zaporizhzhia, 25 miles from the border, where his parents still lived. After evacuating his parents, Liscovich walked into an army recruiting office and volunteered to fight. When recruiters learned Liscovich had been CEO of Uber Works, a former subsidiary of Uber, they suggested that instead of carrying a rifle Liscovich might be more valuable if he could help use his connections in Silicon Valley to get technology to the front. He began visiting frontline units and asking what they needed. Generators, Starlinks, and small drones, they told him. His key insight came when he learned the difference between “corrected” and “uncorrected” artillery fire. The latter often takes 60 rounds to strike the target. But add in a commercial drone—a pair of flying binoculars—and the same fire team can kill the target in five rounds or less. Andrey realized the best way he could help was by liaising between Ukraine military units and the Western technology companies that could aid them.

 

Liscovich created the Ukraine Defense Fund, a nonprofit that supplies nonlethal aid. Raising money, buying products, and shipping them to Europe was relatively straightforward. The big challenge was the “last-mile gap,” getting gear out to the battlefield. Liscovich and his team devised a way to ship equipment from the U.S. through Amsterdam to Warsaw, and then on trucks to Ukraine, in less than 90 hours. Their fastest delivery took only 48 hours.

 

This kind of thinking was prevailing across the front. Zelensky had called up military-aged males from 16 to 60, many of whom had technical skills. “Techno-guerrillas,” they were called. Ukrainians just needed the West to put weapons and commercial technology into their hands, and they could do the rest. “Ukraine’s military is, at its heart, a grassroots fighting force with a significant number of software engineers distributed through its ranks,” said a brief from the Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP), a think tank that former Google CEO Eric Schmidt founded to carry on the AI Commission’s work. Another observer described Ukraine’s military as “a partisan army with a Silicon Valley arm attached.” “Ukraine was learning what happens when you conscript three hundred thousand of the world’s most capable software engineers and send them into battle,” the chief technology officer of Palantir, Shyam Shankar, said, referring to the large number of programmers in Ukraine, many of whom joined the war effort.

 

Ukraine possessed a modern technological infrastructure, with a level of sophistication that surpassed most of its European neighbors and even the U.S., where government online services remain embarrassingly out of date. In 2019, Zelensky had campaigned on a platform of moving the country into “a smartphone state.” Zelensky’s Ministry for Digital Transformation created an app called Diia, for “action,” which was a secure one-stop shop for 80 public services that could be accessed from the web or a smartphone. Users were able to verify their identity via a government biometric database. On the app you can do everything from pay taxes to renew passports, register a vehicle, or create an LLC.

 

After the invasion, programmers in the digital ministry quickly added features for citizens to report Russian forces. A system of crowd-sourced intelligence was thus built out of an app every Ukrainian already used daily. Diia used an encrypted messaging service to transmit pictures taken by citizens to servers in the Ministry of Defense, which scanned the images to locate and identify targets. The result was known as Ukraine’s “Uber for Artillery,” with citizens effectively calling in requests for strikes and the Ministry of Defense carrying them out in near real time. Programmers in the Ministry of Defense next created a real-time battle command application called Delta that blends information from citizen reports with data from NATO systems, fusing the eyes, ears, and smartphone cameras of the Ukrainian people with commercial and classified intelligence. Ukraine’s own tech sector mobilized as well, hardening the digital backbone of Ukrainian government operations so effectively that Russian state cyberspace attackers never severed government services or web access. Though the Internet in Ukraine today is sometimes slow due to denial-of-service attacks, citizens can still access it at home or through the 4G LTE cell networks that have continued to operate during the war.

 

Anduril and the Drone War

Palmer Luckey, the founder of Anduril Industries, crossed into Ukraine in August 2022, six months into the war, becoming the first CEO of a major U.S. defense company to do so. He wanted to see his company’s drones in action and ask soldiers what problems they were having so that he could try to fix them in the field. Luckey brought along three software engineers to train soldiers on how to operate Anduril’s Ghost drone and its ALTIUS loitering munition drone.

 

Luckey founded Anduril in 2017 with Trae Stephens. They aimed to build a new prime with a product-oriented approach. “The current incentive structure rewarded companies that foisted as much risk as possible onto the taxpayer, that were slower, that had more process, that were very good at writing proposals and lobbying, not necessarily building technology. It was literally the inversion of what you do when you want to run an efficient product company,” Luckey said.

 

Luckey’s connections to Ukraine reached back to several years before the war. In 2019 he’d met Zelensky after the Ukrainian president read a Wired magazine article about Anduril’s border security technology. Zelensky asked for a meeting to explore whether Anduril’s Lattice surveillance towers could be deployed along the Russian border. “His position from the very beginning was Russia was going to invade Ukraine, that it was going to happen, and we needed to prepare now,” Luckey recalls.

 

When war broke out, Ukraine started placing orders for Anduril products, including its Ghost drone, which is small enough to be carried by a single person and can be set up in three minutes. Ghost drones use AI software and can operate autonomously. Ukraine employs them for surveillance and intelligence gathering and to help target artillery fire.

 

Drones were playing a huge role in the war, more so than in any previous conflict—it’s fair to say Ukraine was the first full-scale drone war. Infantry and artillery spotters on both sides of the conflict were using inexpensive DJI quadcopters. The Russians were using larger, weaponized Iranian drones; the Ukrainians were countering with Turkish Bayraktar TB2s. Across any given stretch of the front, between 25 and 50 UAVs from both sides were flying. Even the most lethal weapons system in Ukraine, the U.S.-provided High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS), was having its fire directed by drones that could be bought on Amazon.

 

Ukraine trained 10,000 of its citizens in the essentials of operating drones and formed 60 drone strike units. Ukrainian companies also swung into action. Dozens of new startups—more than 60 by one early count—began building custom models less reliant on GPS to navigate. Among the innovations being tested were inertial navigation technology—in which onboard accelerometers allow a drone to deduce where it is—and software that can use cheap cameras to follow terrain visually. A British trainer described Ukrainian artillery operators as having a “cyberpunk” approach to targeting Russian positions. The killer robots crowd finally had something to worry about. Swarms of killer drones were in the air, hunting down individual soldiers who ran from their units during attacks. Russian bloggers posted videos to teach troops what to do when being hunted by a drone.

 

During a visit to Ukraine, Eric Schmidt marveled at the small kamikaze drones that cost $400 and carried three pounds of explosives. These were “nearly impossible to shoot down,” Eric wrote in the Wall Street Journal. Even more terrifying is what comes next, when drones are allowed to make decisions and work together in packs. In the future, like flocks of starlings, “ruthless swarms of AI-empowered kamikaze drones will track mobile targets and algorithmically collaborate to strike past an enemy’s electronic countermeasures,” Schmidt wrote.

 

DIU Rogue Squadron leader Mark Jacobsen recognized years before how important drones would become on a future battlefield. “Ukraine is the war that we were preparing for,” he said. “Both sides are operating combat support labs with hackers working on DJI drones, and both sides are racing to exploit the technology faster.” He added that technology Rogue Squadron developed has found its way onto the battlefield in Ukraine, including an early donation to the Ukrainian Army by Edgesource, a company Rogue Squadron partnered with, of $2 million of counter-UAS capabilities.

 

Perhaps even more significant is that drones are changing the very nature of war. “What we’re really witnessing is the democratization of precision-guided munitions. Every actor, every individual in the battlefield can have a precision-guided munition,” Jacobsen says.

 

“For me, as an air force officer, this is a big deal. Because in the past the way we projected power was by putting a bunch of $200 million airplanes on a parking ramp behind a fence in the combat zone. That’s what we did in Afghanistan and Iraq. But now those airplanes are big juicy targets. One drone can come in and take them out. So this leads us to rethink how we deploy power.”

 

The Russian military, startled by Ukraine’s sophistication in using drones, stationed powerful electronic warfare systems every six miles along the front. The systems jammed radio signals and spoofed GPS. Ukraine’s drones would fly only a few hundred yards and then lose communication links, rendering them useless. A British think tank estimated Ukraine was losing 5,000 drones a month. Russia’s powerful jammers were felt miles from the front. “You can’t order an Uber above the third floor of any hotel in Kyiv,” Andrey Liscovich said. “If you try, your location will come up somewhere in the Indian Ocean.” The Russians also rolled out a secretive new electronic warfare system, Tobol, to attack SpaceX’s Starlink satellite network. Tobol was originally devised as a defensive weapon to protect Russian satellites, but now the Russians were deploying it as an offensive weapon. Tobol works by blending a spoof signal on the satellites’ own frequency to try to jam the communication.

 

Russia and Ukraine were engaged in the same kind of cat-and-mouse game that goes on between cybersecurity professionals and hackers—the kind of battle that DIU’s Rogue Squadron drone team had waged years before in their hangar on Moffett Field, reverse-engineering the software in DJI drones to prevent them from sending data back to China. One side writes software that defends against a certain kind of drone; on the other side hackers furiously crank out fresh code that enables drones to skirt the defenses.

 

This was the hacker battle that Luckey and his Anduril engineers wanted to see firsthand. They flew to Warsaw and drove to Kyiv, where Luckey and Zelensky had “the obligatory handshake photo,” and Zelensky griped about the hassles Ukraine was encountering in dealing with the Pentagon, whose bureaucracy was delaying the shipment of weapons. From Kyiv, the Anduril team traveled to the front. Luckey and his engineers ran training exercises showing Ukrainian soldiers how to install the latest hardware modules on the Ghost. They also wanted to figure out how the Russians were jamming the communication and navigation systems in Anduril drones, so they could update their operating system software to evade Russian electronic warfare technology. One day Luckey and his engineers were coding on laptops on a former Soviet airfield when Luckey was shaken by a distressing realization: “We’re at this airfield and there was a pretty significant military presence there. If I’m Russia, I’m thinking, ‘Okay, we’ve got an airfield with a whole bunch of people who are learning to use the latest, most cutting-edge drone technology that’s just been shipped in from the United States. This is a site that’s full of high-value American hardware and some high-value American people who maybe aren’t really supposed to even be there,’” Luckey recalls. “It was a non-zero chance that this would be a pretty great target for Russia.” He made sure not to mention this to his wife when he got home.

 

The War Over Lessons

At the Pentagon, war was brewing over what lessons to draw from the war. The fault lines were familiar. Innovators at DIU and the Defense Innovation Board, which had since been reconstituted, saw the future they’d been preparing for on full display in Ukraine, a real-life test of the silicon kill chain they’d envisioned. “For me,” Eric Schmidt wrote after a visit to Ukraine, “the war answers a central question: what can technology people do to help their government, and the answer is a lot. Ten programmers can change the way thousands of soldiers operate. . . . I departed Ukraine with an unexpected sense of optimism,” he wrote in his trip report.

 

For Lieutenant General Jack Shanahan, who led Project Maven and was the first leader of the Pentagon’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC), Ukraine represented vindication. The AI-enabled image-tagging that DIU pioneered in Project Maven now runs inside the National Geospatial Agency supporting Ukrainian operations. Shanahan believes we’re in a critical “bridge period” where the most creative and innovative warfighters must figure out how to mate legacy equipment with emerging technologies and come up with new ways to wage war. “What I’m seeing in Ukraine tells me we were right,” Shanahan says. “It’s this weird mix of legacy or traditional weapon systems with commercial and leading-edge technologies. The side that gains the advantage is the side that figures out how to use that combination of technologies in new and different and creative ways.”

 

Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir, traveled to Ukraine as well and came back convinced that AI would soon define the outcome of wars. “If you go into battle with old school technology,” Karp said at an event on AI in warfare, “and you have an adversary that knows how to install and implement digitized targeting in AI, you obviously are at a massive disadvantage.”

 

While technologists in Silicon Valley saw one thing, the old-guard standard bearers in Washington saw something else altogether. Defensive trenches, tank-on-tank, missile system-on-missile system—there was strong continuity with the past, even if it wasn’t exactly the past that was becoming the present. The war over what lessons to learn was thus fought all around the Pentagon’s E-ring. It broke out into the open after the Pentagon’s chief weapons buyer dismissed the importance of Silicon Valley technology. Eight months into the conflict, Pentagon acquisition chief Bill LaPlante—the man most responsible for future U.S. armaments—said this in an interview:

 

“We’re not fighting in Ukraine with Silicon Valley right now, even though they’re going to try to take credit for it. The tech bros aren’t helping us too much in Ukraine. . . . It’s hardcore production of really serious weaponry. That’s what matters. If somebody gives you a really cool liquored up story about a DIU project or OTA contract, ask them when it’s going into production, ask them how many numbers, ask them what the unit cost is going to be, ask them how it will work against China. Ask them all those questions because that’s what matters. And don’t tell me it’s got AI and quantum in it. I don’t care.”

 

LaPlante’s belief that commercial technology is not a significant driver of battlefield outcomes in Ukraine and has few use cases against DoD’s pacing adversaries—the ones who are closing in on the U.S.—is not altogether wrong. Indeed, the conflict in Ukraine has affirmed the importance of major weapons platforms such as tanks and howitzers and the companies that manufacture them. But to adopt LaPlante’s assessment misses the wider view. There is no doubt in innovation circles that Ukraine is indebted to the heroic leadership LaPlante and his colleagues in the Pentagon’s Acquisition and Sustainment Office provided—for getting traditional weapons platforms and munitions to the battle space, mobilizing the defense industrial base when our stores of advanced munitions proved woefully inadequate, setting up 24/7 callback centers to help Ukrainian personnel master new weapons systems, and restarting production of key armaments despite factory lines having been idled for 15 years or more.

 

But it would be wrong and even tragic to read the dynamics in Ukraine as a reassertion of old warfighting paradigms, or as justification for preserving the industrial base in its current form. To do this would be to miss the beguiling hybridity and asymmetry of the battlefield that has evolved in Ukraine, as well as parallel developments in other battle spaces, such as what is occurring in Armenia-Azerbaijan, the North Korean drone incursions into Seoul, and the People’s Liberation Army’s experimentation with commercial technologies under Xi’s doctrine of civil-military fusion in China.

 

From our point of view, the lesson is that commercial technologies are being deployed by both Russia and Ukraine in tandem with traditional, exquisite weapons systems, both to enhance their effectiveness and enable their defeat. At a Stanford symposium, Chris argued that “one of the most significant lessons emerging from Ukraine may be the difference commercial technology makes in great power conflict—its ability to attrit superior enemy weapons systems, supplant legacy command, control, intelligence, and reconnaissance, and multiply the combat effectiveness of stock armaments from Ukraine, Russian, NATO, and the United States.” As Raj told the conference participants, “From a scale standpoint, we need more mass.” The goal is to make our current systems more effective by leveraging commercial technology. “There’s $600 billion in private capital going to technology every year. Ukraine has completely changed attitudes in the technology world and in Silicon Valley. There are so many young, mission-oriented entrepreneurs who now want to work in defense and, promisingly, venture firms willing to back them.”

 

The DIU ecosystem is having real impact. By one count, 30 new products created by startups, mostly in California, were being used on the Ukraine front lines. Capella Space, the maker of SAR satellites, saw its revenues triple in 2022, and it looked as if they might triple again in 2023. Startups were nevertheless only modest players in the war compared with the primes. In December 2022, the primes threw a kind of appreciation party at the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington. Invitations were embossed with the logos of Raytheon, Northrup Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and Pratt & Whitney. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley showed up, as did most members of the House and Senate Armed Services Committee. There was a lot to celebrate. Lockheed Martin had booked several billion in orders supplying Ukraine. Raytheon had won $2 billion in contracts from the army alone.

 

As the Pentagon’s policy agenda took greater shape toward the midpoint of President Biden’s term, any assessment of defense innovation would necessarily reach mixed conclusions. Individual services and the Office of the Secretary of Defense have more innovation entities than ever before. More acquisitions are being made through streamlined Commercial Solutions Opening processes, with $70 billion in purchases to date. But a composite military vision or approach that fully leverages commercial technology into a new construct for joint warfighting has proved elusive. And resources are still not flowing to innovation at any where near the scale needed for the department to realize Ash Carter’s “fast-follower” vision.

 

To the extent present military and civilian leadership were articulating a strategy when Putin’s forces crossed into Ukraine, it was built for the most part on a continuation of previous programmatic and budgetary trend lines with a few significant departures from historical baselines, with the exception of the Marine Corps retiring tanks that would never see battle and replacing them with long-range missiles and electronic warfare systems. If there is a strategy for losing a future war with China, this is it. Shortly after Bill LaPlante made his remarks about Silicon Valley tech, Northrop Grumman publicly revealed the new B-21 strategic bomber, which LaPlante oversaw as head of acquisition for the air force. With a reported unit cost of $692 million, the total program cost to develop and operate one hundred B-21s will exceed $200 billion. In comparison, each Anduril ALTIUS loitering munition drone costs about $250,000. Certain essential missions require stealth bombers, yet their cost compared with other approaches cannot be ignored.

 

Contrary to LaPlante’s assertion, the “tech bros” are in Ukraine and they matter to the fight. The next question is what they might do for other wars in other places.

 

Today in Ukraine, Tomorrow in Taiwan

Ukraine has become a laboratory not only for DIU operational concepts that pair commercial tech with traditional weapon systems, but also for how a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would likely unfold. “Arguably the most important task DoD faces today is deterring China from invading Taiwan, thus avoiding a war that would be devastating for both countries and risk nuclear escalation,” says Mark Jacobsen. The war in Ukraine is already being viewed by Chinese strategists as a struggle between superpowers. In the first year of the conflict, Chinese researchers wrote over 100 papers assessing the war and its implications. Though Chinese analysts hadn’t expected Russia to fare so badly, they noted that China’s military budget, at $225 billion, was three times the size of Russia’s and that China has a vast manufacturing capacity to build the drones and other weapons that Russia lacks. Chinese analysts are readying for what might be the next battle, with military rocket scientists noting that “faced with the threat of Starlink, we must develop and build our own low-orbiting satellites.” “Not a moment can be spared in developing ‘soft-kill’ and ‘hard kill’ measures,” one said. As a Western analyst observed, “China is close to this in a way that wasn’t true of Iraq or even Afghanistan. They see themselves potentially in Russia’s shoes, in more or less going to war against America.”

 

Anduril’s Palmer Luckey is already anticipating the potential conflict. “Our entire internal road map has been around how do you deter China, not just in Taiwan, but Taiwan and beyond,” Luckey says. Anduril is losing money selling drones to Ukraine but is gaining valuable know-how from the opportunity to test its technology in actual combat. “The Ukraine war has been a financially detrimental but necessary detour for Anduril. There’s a lot of things that we’re doing that are relevant in Ukraine that are also relevant to a potential fight in the Pacific,” he says.

 

Taiwan would be infinitely more difficult to defend than Ukraine. Kyiv sits only 428 miles from a major NATO base, while there are 7,000 miles of ocean between Taipei and permanent U.S. military forces. Ukraine avoided power interruptions in part because its over-engineered power grid boasts twice the capacity that the country needs—ironically, the system was originally designed by the Soviets to withstand a NATO attack. In the first days of a conflict with Taiwan, China would likely knock out its energy grid, communications infrastructure, and Internet and blockade the island, choking off a country dependent on food and fuel imports from the rest of the world. The war’s opening moves could unfold so quickly it would be effectively over before the U.S. could stop it. In December 2023, Chris met in Taipei with former national security advisor Linwu Guo and former member of Parliament Jason Hsu. The latter spoke urgently about the need for Taiwan to create its own DIU and turn itself into a “porcupine” that can defend against an invasion by a foe that outnumbers its population 58 to 1.

 

To us there is an even darker lesson. Putin’s attempt to grab Ukraine was against all of Russia’s long-term interests. “Yet Putin did it. It’s a reminder that if the leader captures the state, like Xi has done in China and Putin in Russia, they can do as they please,” Chris said to Raj. “It’s the most dangerous possible situation. We are so far from The End of History and the Last Man,” Chris lamented, referring to Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 book that predicted the triumph of free markets and democracy would lead to a forever peace.

 

“It’s time to bring back Thucydides,” Raj said. The chronicler of the Peloponnesian Wars theorized that states act toward each other out of fear, honor, and self-interest.

 

“And Hobbes,” Chris rejoined. The seventeenth-century English philosopher believed that without maintaining a monopoly of the means of violence, humans would devolve into a state of nature, where all fear violent death.

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