AI and the Future of Warfare with US Under Secretary of War Emil Michael
Silicon Valley
Goes to War.
“"The pentagon doesn't have a 'buying' problem; it has a 'imagination' problem. We're still trying to build aircraft carriers in an era of $500 kamikaze drones."
Personnel File
Emil Michael
Ex-Uber Chief Business Officer. Now, the architect of a new "Department of War" ethos.
Scaling Lethality at Startup Speed
Emil Michael isn't interested in the slow, grinding machinery of traditional defense contracting. His role at the Department of War (DoW) isn't just about procurement—it's about industrial arbitrage.
The Uber Playbook
At Uber, Emil dealt with regulators and entrenched taxi monopolies. At the DoW, the "monopolies" are the prime contractors who have dominated the budget for fifty years. His mandate? Break the cycle of 20-year development phases.
The New Lethality
It’s no longer about who has the biggest jet. It’s about who has the most resilient mesh network and the fastest AI-inference at the edge. Emil is pivoting the DoW toward software-defined warfare.
Innovation
Heat Map
Where is the capital actually flowing? Emil outlines a hierarchy of needs that looks less like a military parade and more like a Series A pitch deck. The focus has shifted from "Hardware First" to "Intelligence Everywhere."
- Attrition Tolerance: Cheap drones, mass-produced.
- Edge Compute: Decisions made on the device, not the cloud.
- Rapid Iteration: Updates pushed weekly, not per decade.
As the DoW recalibrates for a software-first reality, the next logical step isn't just better tools—it's total autonomy.
Up Next: The Shift Toward Autonomous Defense Technologies →
Beyond the Iron Triangle: The Autonomy Mandate
Building on Emil’s mandate to overhaul the Department’s innovation priorities, we’re witnessing a seismic departure from "business as usual." We are moving past the era where defense was defined by the weight of armor or the thrust of an engine. The new frontier isn't just about hardware; it’s about the intelligence density of our systems.
"The friction isn't in the physics anymore," Emil notes with a characteristic bluntness. "It’s in the latency between a sensor seeing a threat and a platform making a decision. If that decision-loop is human-speed in a machine-speed world, we’ve already lost."
"We aren't just building smarter jets; we're architecting a sovereign nervous system for the modern theater."
The Unified Data Problem
Before we can deploy "Applied AI," we have to kill the silos. Every branch of the DoW has been speaking a different dialect of data. Identifying common needs meant finding the Rosetta Stone for cross-departmental telemetry.
Legacy Friction
"We have systems older than the engineers trying to upgrade them. The 'common need' is often just a bridge from the 1980s to the 2030s."
Priority Shift: Logic over Lumber
Visualizing the transition of R&D investment from pure kinetic platforms to autonomous software integration.
Architecting GenAI.mil
The blueprint for the Department's Large Language Model backbone. Secure, Air-gapped, and Mission-Specific.
The Secure Wrapper
Developing a sovereign inference layer that allows for the use of state-of-the-art models without data bleeding into the public domain.
RAG for Doctrine
Integrating Retrieval-Augmented Generation across 70 years of military doctrine to provide instant, tactical context to field commanders.
The Edge Deployment
Quantizing models to run on ruggedized hardware at the tactical edge—where connectivity is a luxury, not a guarantee.
Applied AI: Beyond the Pilot Phase
We are moving past the "PowerPoint AI" phase. Applied AI initiatives at the DoW are now manifesting in predictive maintenance for the Pacific fleet and autonomous swarm coordination in contested environments. This isn't theoretical; it's code being pushed to the front lines.
As we look toward the horizon of this technological shift, the focus inevitably turns to the human element. How does the nature of warfare itself change when the "fighter" is a line of code, and how do we find the talent to write it?
Transitioning from Applied AI to Grand Strategy
Beyond the Algorithm: The New Kinetic Reality
We’ve moved past the sandbox of GenAI.mil. If the last decade was about digitizing the bureaucracy, the next decade is about the lethal elegance of autonomous systems. It’s not just about code; it’s about the soul of the machine in the heat of the "Arsenal of Freedom."
"Warfare is becoming a software-defined problem."
The battlefield isn't just mud and steel anymore—it’s latency. The person who iterates their model faster wins the hill. We aren't just looking for better tanks; we’re looking for the algorithmic edge that makes those tanks obsolete before they even fire a shell.
The "Hot Take"? The Department of Warfare (DoW) is becoming a tech company with a massive hardware footprint. If you aren't thinking about sensor-to-shooter loops in milliseconds, you're playing yesterday's game.
Projected Capability Shift: 2024–2034
The Tour Sentiment
"The Arsenal of Freedom isn't a museum; it’s a living, breathing factory of democracy. We’re taking the best of Silicon Valley and putting it in the hands of the 18-year-old on the front line."
Recruiting the Resistance
We don't just want the "top 1%." We want the misfits who are tired of building ad-click optimizers. If you want to build something that actually *matters* for the survival of the republic, the DoW has a seat for you. No suit required—just a relentless obsession with the mission.
The Founder's Path
- 01. Bypass the "Valley of Death" with SBIR Phase III direct contracts.
- 02. Rapid Prototyping: From concept to field test in < 90 days.
- 03. Dual-Use focus: Build for the battlefield, scale for the world.
The challenge isn't just the idea—it's the scale. How do we take these entrepreneurial bursts and turn them into a systemic surge?
Up Next: Speeding Up and Scaling DoW Initiatives →
The Velocity of Freedom: Beyond the Tour.
The "Arsenal of Freedom" tour wasn't just about handshakes and photo ops in the heartland; it was a diagnostic. Having identified the hunger for change among entrepreneurs at DoW, the conversation now pivots to the "How." How do we move from a localized spark to a systemic wildfire?
"Scaling isn't just about adding more zeros to a budget. It's about collapsing the time between 'good idea' and 'battlefield ready'. Right now, that gap is a graveyard for startups."
01. The Innovation Friction
In Defense Tech, innovation is often held hostage by "Change Management." It’s the art of convincing a calcified bureaucracy that the risk of staying the same is higher than the risk of trying something new. Scaling DoW means breaking the institutional muscle memory of "the way we've always done it."
Hot Take
"Hardware is no longer the bottleneck. Our procurement software and 1950s-era mindset are the real drag coefficients on American dominance."
The DIB Renaissance
Rebuilding the Defense Industrial Base requires more than just money—it requires a cultural shift toward "Production as Strategy."
Fig 1.1: The Chasm between Bureaucracy and Necessity
"We aren't fixing a system. We are overwriting it."
"The Defense Industrial Base isn't just about making bombs. It’s about the talent pool. If we can't scale the way DoW interacts with a kid in a garage in Ohio, we've already lost the next tech war."
"But how do you handle the change management inside the Pentagon? You’re talking about career bureaucrats who have survived by *not* taking risks."
"You don't wait for them to change. You create a new gravity well. You make the new system so efficient that the old one becomes a ghost town."
Scaling isn't just a matter of will; it's a matter of structural support. As the conversation on the Defense Industrial Base matures, the focus shifts toward the actual levers of power and capital—specifically, how the Office of Strategic Capital is positioned to provide the fuel for this new engine. Emil’s time in government provides the blueprint for what comes next.
If rebuilding the industrial base is the "what," the Office of Strategic Capital (OSC) is the "how." It's the financial engine room where policy meets the cold, hard reality of capital markets.
Bridging the Capital Gap
The OSC isn't just another government office; it’s a strategic pivot. We are moving away from the "grant and pray" model toward sophisticated debt instruments and loan guarantees. Why? Because the "Valley of Death" isn't just about bad tech—it's about a lack of patient, strategic liquidity in deep tech.
Component Manufacturing
Focusing on the sub-tier suppliers that the VC world often ignores.
Financial Engineering
Utilizing loan guarantees to lower the cost of capital for domestic production.
Priority Vectors
Bureaucracy is not a wall; it’s a dense fog.
My time in government taught me one brutal lesson: Velocity is a choice. People think the Pentagon is slow because of malice or incompetence. It’s neither. It’s a system designed to prevent the wrong thing from happening, which, by default, makes it nearly impossible for the right thing to happen quickly.
The Innovator’s Playbook in DC
- 01. Find the "No" and deconstruct it. Most "no's" are actually "I don't have the authority to say yes." Find the person who does.
- 02. Speak the local dialect. You can't walk into the E-Ring talking like a Silicon Valley disruptor. You talk in terms of readiness, lethality, and strategic deterrence.
- 03. Persistence is the only superpower. The system is designed to outlast you. Don't let it.
If you want to change the world from the inside, you have to be willing to be the most annoying person in the room for the right reasons. It’s about building a coalition of the willing across the aisle and across the river.
The future belongs to the builders, not the bureaucrats.
End of Session