Steve Blank

I’m teaching my first non-lean start up class in a decade at Stanford next week; Technology, Innovation and Modern War: Keeping America’s Edge in an Era of Great Power Competition. The class is joint listed in Stanford’s International Policy department as well as in the Engineering School, in the department of Management Science and Engineering.

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Why This Course?

Five years ago, Joe Felter, Pete Newell and I realized that few of our students considered careers in the Department of Defense or Intelligence Community. In response we developed the Hacking for Defense class where students could learn about the nation’s emerging threats and security challenges while working with innovators inside the Department of Defense (DoD) and Intelligence Community to solve real national security problems. Today there is a national network of 40 colleges and universities teaching Hacking for Defense. We’ve created a network of entrepreneurial students who understand the security threats facing the country and engaged them in partnership with islands of innovation in the DOD/IC. The output of these classes is providing hundreds of solutions to critical national security problems every year. This was our first step in fostering a more agile, responsive and resilient, approach to national security in the 21st century.

Fast forward to today. For the first time since the start of the Cold War, Americans face the prospect of being unable to win in a future conflict. In 2017, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff gave a prescient warning that “In just a few years, if we do not change the trajectory, we will lose our qualitative and quantitative competitive advantage.” Those few years are now, and this warning is coming to fruition.

New emerging technologies will radically change how countries will be able to fight and deter threats across air, land, sea, space, and cyber. But winning future conflicts requires more than just adopting new technology; it requires a revolution in thinking about how this technology can be integrated into weapons systems to drive new operational and organizational concepts that change the way we fight.

Early in 2020, Joe Felter (previously Assistant Secretary of Defense for South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Oceania and Hacking for Defense co-creator) and I began to talk about the need for a new class that gave students an overview of the new technologies and explored how new technologies turn into weapons, and how new concepts to use them will emerge. We recruited Raj Shah (previously the managing director of the Defense Innovation Unit that was responsible for contracting with commercial companies to solve national security problems) and we started designing the class. One couldn’t hope for a better set of co-instructors.

The Class
War, in one form or another, appeared with the first man. Ever since someone picked up a rock and realized you could throw it, humans have embraced new technology for war. Each new generation of technology (spears, bows and arrows, guns, planes, etc.) inevitably created new types of military systems. But just picking up the rock didn’t win a conflict, it required the development of a new operational concept learning how to use it to win, i.e. what was the best way to throw a rock, how many people needed to throw rocks, the timing of when you threw it, etc. As each new technology created new military systems, new operational concepts were developed (bows and arrows were used differently than rocks, etc.). Our course will examine the new operational concepts and strategies that will emerge from 21st century technologies – Space, Cyber, AI & Machine Learning and Autonomy. We’ll describe how new military systems are acquired, funded, and fielded, and also consider the roles of Congress, incumbent contractors, lobbyists, and start-ups.

This course begins with an overview of the history of military innovation then describes the U.S. strategies developed since World War II to gain and maintain our technological competitive edge during the bipolar standoff of the Cold War. Next, we’ll discuss the challenge of our National Defense Strategy – we no longer face a single Cold War adversary but potentially five – in what are called the “2+3 threats” (China and Russia plus Iran, North Korea, and non-nation state actors.)

The course offers students the insight that for hundreds of years, innovation in military systems has followed a repeatable pattern:  technology innovation > new weapons > experimentation with new weapons/operational concepts > pushback from incumbents > first use of new operational concepts.

In the second part of course, we’ll use this framework to examine the military applications of emerging technologies in Space, Cyber, AI & Machine Learning, and Autonomy. Students will develop their own proposals for new operational concepts, defense organizations, and strategies to address these emergent technologies while heeding the funding and political hurdles to get them implemented.

The course draws on the experience and expertise of guest lecturers from industry and from across the Department of Defense and other government agencies to provide context and perspective. Bookending the class will be two past secretaries of Defense – Ash Carter and Jim Mattis.

Much like we’ve done with our past classes; – the Lean LaunchPad which became the National Science Foundation I-Corps (taught in 98 universities) and Hacking For Defense (taught in 40 schools,) – our goal is to open source this class to other universities.

As Christian Brose assesses in his prescient book “The Kill Chain”, our challenge is not the lack of money, technology, or capable and committed people in the US government, military and private industry – but of a lack of imagination. This course, like its cousin Hacking for Defense, aims to harness America’s comparative advantage in innovative thinking and the quality of its institutions of higher education, to bring imaginative and creative approaches to developing the new operational concepts we need to compete and prevail in this era of great power rivalry.

The syllabus for the class is below:

Technology, Innovation and Modern War

Part I: History, Strategy and Challenges

Sep 15: Course Introduction
Guest Speaker: Ash Carter 25th Secretary of Defense

Sep 17: History of Defense Innovation: From Long Bows to Nuclear Weapons and Off-Set Strategies.
Guest Speaker: Max Boot author War Made New

Sep 22: DoD 101: Sourced, Acquiring and Deploying Technology for Modern War.
Guest Speaker: Anja Manuel ex State Dept, responsible for South Asia Policy

Sep 24: US Defense Strategies and Military Plans in an Era of Great Power Competition
Guest Speaker: Bridge Colby ex Deputy Asst Secretary of Defense for Strategy and Force Development

Sep 29: The Challenges of Defending America in the Future of High Tech War
Guest Speaker: Christian Brose, author The Kill Chain, head of Strategy for Anduril

Oct 1: Innovations in Acquisitions in Modern War
Guest Speaker: Will Roper Asst Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics

Part II: Military Applications, Operational Concepts, Organization and Strategy 

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
Oct 6: Introduction
Guest Speaker: LTG General Jack Shanahan (ret)  fmr Director Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC)

Oct 8: Military Applications
Guest Speaker: Chris Lynch (CEO Rebellion Defense, ex head Defense Digital Service/Nand Mulchandani(CTO of the JAIC)

Autonomy
Oct 13: Introduction
Guest Speaker: Maynard Holliday

Oct 16: Military Applications
Guest Speaker: Michele Flournoy

Cyber
Oct 20: Introduction
Guest Speaker: Michael Sulmeyer

Oct 22: Military Applications
Guest Speaker: Sumit Agarwal

Space
Oct 27: Introduction/Military Applications
Guest Speaker: General John Raymond, Commander U.S. Space Force

Oct 29: Applying Innovaton to Future Plans
Guest Speaker: Admiral Lorin Selby, Chief of Naval Research

Part III: Building an integrated plan for the future (Student group project)

How to build a plan for future war
Nov 3:
Guest Speaker(s): COCOM and Joint Staff Planners

Nov 5: Conops planning
Guest Speaker: Maj. General Mike Fenzel

Nov 10: Budget and Planning/Mid Term Presentation
Guest Speaker: Congressman Mike Gallagher

Group Presentations Dry Runs and Instructor Critiques
Nov 12: All six teams

Group Presentations
Nov 17: All six teams
Guest Critique:  US Indo-Pacom TBA

Course Reflections
Nov 19: Defending a Shared Vision for the Future
Guest Speaker General (ret) James Mattis 26th Secretary of Defense

Filed under: Corporate/Gov't Innovation, Technology Innovation and Great Power Competition |