Technology, Innovation, and Great Power Competition – 2023 Wrap Up

Posted on February 6, 2024 by steve blank

We just wrapped up the third year of our Technology, Innovation, and Great Power Competition class –part of Stanford’s Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation.

Joe Felter, Mike Brown and I teach the class to:

  • Give our students an appreciation of the challenges and opportunities for the United States in its enduring strategic competition with the People’s Republic of China, Russia and other rivals.
  • Offer insights on how commercial technology (AI, autonomy, cyber, quantum, semiconductors, access to space, biotech, hypersonics, and others) are radically changing how we will compete across all the elements of national power e.g. diplomatic, informational, military, economic, financial, intelligence and law enforcement (our influence and footprint on the world stage).
  • Expose students to experiential learning on policy questions. Students formed teams, got out of the classroom and talked to the stakeholders and developed policy recommendations.

Why This Class?
The recognition that the United States is engaged in long-term strategic competition with the Peoples Republic of China and Russia became a centerpiece of the 2017 National Security Strategy and 2018 National Defense Strategy. The 2021 interim National Security Guidance and the administration’s recently released 2022 National Security Strategy make clear that China has rapidly become more assertive and is the only competitor potentially capable of combining its economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to mount a sustained challenge to a stable and open international system. And as we’ve seen in Ukraine, Russia remains determined to wage a brutal war to play a disruptive role on the world stage.

Prevailing in this competition will require more than merely acquiring the fruits of this technological revolution; it will require a paradigm shift in the thinking of how this technology can be rapidly integrated into new capabilities and platforms to drive new operational and organizational concepts and strategies that change and optimize the way we compete.

Class Organization
The readings, lectures, and guest speakers explored how emerging commercial technologies pose challenges and create opportunities for the United States in its strategic competition with great power rivals with an emphasis on the People’s Republic of China. We focused on the challenges created when U.S. government agencies, our federal research labs, and government contractors no longer have exclusive access to these advanced technologies.

This course included all that you would expect from a Stanford graduate-level class in the Masters in International Policy – comprehensive readings, guest lectures from current and former senior officials/experts, and written papers. What makes the class unique however, is that this is an experiential policy class. Students formed small teams and embarked on a quarter-long project that got them out of the classroom to:

  • identify a priority national security challenge, and then …
  • validate the problem and propose a detailed solution tested against actual stakeholders in the technology and national security ecosystem.

The class was split into three parts.

Part 1, weeks 1 through 4 covered the international relations theories that attempt to explain the dynamics of interstate competition between powerful states, U.S. national security and national defense strategies and policies guiding our approach to Great Power Competition specifically focused on the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

In between parts 1 and 2 of the class, the students had a midterm individual project. It required them to write a 2,000-word policy memo describing how a U.S. competitor is using a specific technology to counter U.S. interests and a proposal for how the U.S. should respond.

Part 2, weeks 5 through 8, dove into the commercial technologies: semiconductors, space, cyber, AI and Machine Learning, High Performance Computing, and Biotech. Each week the students had to read 5-10 articles (see class readings here.) And each week we had guest speakers on great power competition, and technology and its impact on national power and lectures/class discussion.

Guest Speakers
In addition to the teaching team, the course drew on the experience and expertise of guest lecturers from industry and from across U.S. Government agencies to provide context and perspective on commercial technologies and national security.

The students were privileged to hear from extraordinary  guest speakers with significant experience and credibility on a range of topics related to the course objectives. Highlights of this year’s speakers include:

On National Security and American exceptionalism: General Jim Mattis, US Marine Corps (Ret.), former Secretary of Defense.

On China’s activities and efforts to compete with the U.S.: Matt Pottinger – former Deputy National Security Advisor, Elizabeth Economy – leading China scholar and former Dept of Commerce Senior Advisor for China, Tai Ming Cheung, – Author of Innovate to Dominate: The Rise of the Chinese Techno-Security State.

On U.S. – China Policy: Congressman Mike Gallagher, Chair House Select Committe on China.

On Innovation and National Security: Chris Brose – Author of The Kill Chain, Doug Beck – Director of the Defense Innovation Unit, Anja Manuel – Executive Director of the Aspen Strategy and Security Forum.

For Biotech: Ben Kirukup – senior biologist US Navy, Ed You – FBI Special Agent Biological Countermeasures Unit, Deborah Rosenblum – Asst Sec of Defense for Nuclear, Chemical, and Biological Defense Programs, Joe DeSimone – Professor Chemical Engineering.

For AI: Jared Dunnmon – Technical Director for AI at the Defense Innovation Unit, Lt. Gen. (Ret) Jack Shanahan – Director, Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, Anshu Roy-  CEO Rhombus AI

For Cyber: Anne Neuberger – deputy national security advisor for cyber

For Semiconductors: Larry Diamond – Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution

Significantly, the students were able to hear the Chinese perspective on U.S. – China competition from Dr. Jia Qingguo – Member of the Standing Committee of the Central Committee of China.

The class closed with a stirring talk and call to action by former National Security Advisor LTG ret H.R. McMaster.

In the weeks in-between we had teaching team lectures followed by speakers that led discussions on the critical commercial technologies.

Team-based Experiential Project
The third part of the class was unique – a quarter-long, team-based project. Students formed teams of 4-6 and selected a national security challenge facing an organization or agency within the U.S. Government. They developed hypotheses of how commercial technologies can be used in new and creative ways to help the U.S. wield its instruments of national power. And consistent with all our Gordian Knot Center classes, they got out of the classroom. and interviewed 20+ beneficiaries, policy makers, and other key stakeholders testing their hypotheses and proposed solutions.

Hacking For Policy – Final Presentations:
At the end of the quarter, each student teams’ policy recommendations were summarized in a 10-minute presentation. The presentation was the story of the team’s learning journey, describing where they started, where they ended, and the key inflection points in their understanding of the problem. (A written 3000 word report followed focusing on their recommendations for addressing their chosen security challenge and describing how their solutions can be implemented with speed and urgency.)

By the end of the class all the teams realized that the policy problem they had selected had morphed into something bigger, deeper, and much more interesting.

Their policy presentations are below.

The class is as exhausting to teach as it to take. We have an awesome set of teaching assistants.

Team 1: Precision Match (AI for DoD Operations)

Click here to see the presentation.

What makes teaching worthwhile is the feedback we get from our students:

TIGPC has been the best class I’ve taken at Stanford and has caused me to do some reflection in what I want to do after my time at Stanford. I’m only a sophomore but doing such a deep dive into energy and (as Steve says) getting out of the building, I’m starting to seriously consider a career in clean energy security post graduation.

Team 2: Outbound Investment to China

Click here to see the presentation.

Team 3: Open-Source AI

Click here to see a summary of the presentation.

Team 4: AlphaChem

Click here to see the presentation.

One of my takeaways from the class is that you can be the smartest person in the room, but you will never have as much knowledge as everyone else combined so go talk to people, it will make you far smarter

Team 5: South China Sea

Click here to see the presentation.

Awesome class! … incredible in bringing prestigious guest speakers into the class and having engaging discussions. My background was not in national security and this class really offered an important perspective on the opportunities for technology innovation to impact and help with national security.

Team 6: Chinese Real Estate Investment in the U.S.

Click here to see the presentation.

Team 7: Public Private Partnerships

Click here to see the presentation.

Just wanted to let you know that, as a Senior, this is one of the best classes I’ve taken across my 4 years at Stanford.

Team 8: Ukraine Aid

Click here to see the presentation.

Lessons Learned

  • We combined lecture and experiential learning so our students can act on problems not just admire them
    • The external input the students received was a force multiplier
    • It made the lecture material real, tangible and actionable
    • Lean problem solving methods can be effectively employed to address pressing national security and policy challenges
    • This course was akin to a “Hacking for Policy class” and can be tweaked and replicated going forward.
  • The class created opportunities for our best and brightest to engage and address challenges at the nexus of technology, innovation and national security
    • When students are provided such opportunities they aggressively seize them with impressive results
    • The final presentations and papers from the class are proof that will happen
  • Pushing students past what they think is reasonable results in extraordinary output. Most rise way above the occasion

Filed under: National Security, Technology Innovation and Great Power Competition | 2 Comments »

Reorganizing the DoD to Deter China and Win in the Ukraine – A Road Map for Congress

Posted on April 19, 2023 by steve blank

This article previously appeared in Defense News. It was co-written with Joe Felter, and Pete Newell.

Today, the U.S. is supporting a proxy war with Russia while simultaneously attempting to deter a China cross-strait invasion of Taiwan. Both are wakeup calls that victory and deterrence in modern war will be determined by a state’s ability to both use traditional weapons systems and simultaneously rapidly acquire, deploy, and integrate commercial technologies (drones, satellites, targeting software, et al) into operations at every level.

Ukraine’s military is not burdened with the DoD’s 65-year-old acquisition process and 20th-century operational concepts. It is learning and adapting on the fly. China has made the leap to a “whole of nation” approach. This has allowed the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) to integrate private capital and commercial technology and use them as a force multiplier to dominate the South China Sea and prepare for a cross-strait invasion of Taiwan.

The DoD has not done either of these. It is currently organized and oriented to execute traditional weapons systems and operational concepts with its traditional vendors and research centers but is woefully unprepared to integrate commercial technologies and private capital at scale.

Copying SecDef Ash Carter’s 2015 strategy, China has been engaged in Civil/Military Fusion employing a whole of government coordinated effort to harness these disruptive commercial technologies for its national security needs. To fuel the development of technologies critical for defense, China has tapped into $900 billion of private capital in Civil/Military Guidance (Investment) Funds and has taken public state owned enterprises to fund their new shipyards, aircraft, and avionics.  Worse, China will learn from and apply the lessons from Russia’s failures in the Ukraine at an ever increasing pace.

But unlike America’s arch strategic rival, the US to date has been unwilling and unable to adapt and adopt new models of systems and operational concepts at the speed of our adversaries. These include attritable systems, autonomous systems, swarms, and other emerging new defense platforms threaten legacy systems, incumbent vendors, organizations, and cultures. (Until today, the U.S. effort was still-born with its half-hearted support of its own Defense Innovation Unit and history of lost capabilities like those that were inherent the US Army’s Rapid Equipping Force.)

Viewing the DoD budget as a zero-sum game has turned the major defense primes and K-street lobbyists into saboteurs for DoD organizational innovation that threaten their business models. Using private capital could be a force multiplier by adding 100’s of billions of dollars outside the DoD budget. Today, private capital is disincented to participate in national security and incentives are aligned to ensure the U.S. military is organized and configured to fight and win the wars of the last century.  The U.S. is on a collision course to experience catastrophic failure in a future conflict because of it. Only Congress can alter this equation.

For the U.S. to deter and prevail against China the DoD must create both a strategy and a redesigned organization to embrace those untapped external resources – private capital and commercial innovation. Currently the DoD lacks a coherent plan and an organization with the budget and authority to do so.

A reorganized and refocused DoD could acquire traditional weapons systems while simultaneously rapidly acquiring, deploying, and integrating commercial technologies. It would create a national industrial policy that incentivizes the development of 21st-century shipyards, drone and satellite factories and a new industrial base along the lines of the CHIPS and Innovation and Competition acts.

Congress must act to identify and implement changes within the DoD needed to optimize its organization and structure. These include:

  1. Create a new defense ecosystem that uses the external commercial innovation ecosystem and private capital as a force multiplier. Leverage the expertise of prime contractors as integrators of advanced technology and complex systems, refocus Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDCs) on areas not covered by commercial tech (kinetics, energetics, nuclear and hypersonics).
  2. Reorganize DoD Research and Engineering. Allocate its budget and resources equally between traditional sources of innovation and new commercial sources of innovation and capital. Split the OSD R&E organization in half. Keep the current organization focused on the status quo. Create a peer organization – the Under Secretary of Defense for Commercial Innovation and Private Capital.
  3. Scale up the new Office of Strategic Capital (OSC) and the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) to be the lead agencies in this new organization. Give them the budget and authority to do so and provide the services the means to do the same.
  4. Reorganize DoD Acquisition and Sustainment. Allocate its budget and resources equally between traditional sources of production and the creation of new from 21st-century arsenals – new shipyards, drone manufacturers, etc. – that can make 1,000s of low-cost, attritable systems.
  5. Coordinate with Allies. Expand the National Security Innovation Base (NSIB) to an Allied Security Innovation Base. Source commercial technology from allies.

Why Is It Up To Congress?

National power is ephemeral. Nations decline when they lose allies, economic power, interest in global affairs, experience internal/civil conflicts, or miss disruptive technology transitions and new operational concepts.

The case can be made that all of these have or are happening to the U.S.

There is historical precedent for Congressional action to ensure the DoD is organized to fight and win our wars. The 1986 Goldwater/Nichols Act laid the foundation for conducting coordinated and effective joint operations by reorganizing the roles of the military services, and the Joint Chiefs, and creating the Joint Staff and the combatant commands. US Congress must take Ukraine and China’s dominance in the South China Sea as call for action and immediately establish a commission to determine what reforms and changes are needed to ensure the U.S. can fight and win our future wars.

While parts of the DoD understand we’re in a crisis to deter, or if that fails, win a war in the South China Sea, the DoD as a whole shows little urgency and misses a crucial point: China will not defer solving the Taiwan issue on our schedule. Russia will not defer its future plans for aggression to meet our dates.  We need to act now.

We fail to do so at our peril and the peril of all those who depend on U.S. security to survive.

Filed under: China, National Security, Technology Innovation and Great Power Competition | 10 Comments »

Technology, Innovation, and Great Power Competition  – 2022 Wrap Up

Posted on January 5, 2023 by steve blank

We just wrapped up the second year of our Technology, Innovation, and Great Power Competition class – now part of our Stanford Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation.

Joe Felter, Raj Shah and I designed the class to 1) give our students an appreciation of the challenges and opportunities for the United States in its enduring strategic competition with the People’s Republic of China, Russia and other rivals, and 2) offer insights on how commercial technology (AI, machine learning, autonomy, cyber, quantum, semiconductors, access to space, biotech, hypersonics, and others) are radically changing how we will compete across all the elements of national power e.g. diplomatic, informational, military, economic, financial, intelligence and law enforcement (our influence and footprint on the world stage).

Why This Class?
The return of strategic competition between great powers became a centerpiece of the 2017 National Security Strategy and 2018 National Defense Strategy. The 2021 Interim National Security Guidance and the administration’s recently released 2022 National Security Strategy make clear that China has rapidly become more assertive and is the only competitor potentially capable of combining its economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to mount a sustained challenge to a stable and open international system. And as we’ve seen in the Ukraine, Russia remains determined to wage a brutal war to play a disruptive role on the world stage.

Prevailing in this competition will require more than merely acquiring the fruits of this technological revolution; it will require a paradigm shift in the thinking of how this technology can be rapidly integrated into new capabilities and platforms to drive new operational and organizational concepts and strategies that change and optimize the way we compete.

Class Organization
The readings, lectures, and guest speakers explored how emerging commercial technologies pose challenges and create opportunities for the United States in strategic competition with great power rivals with an emphasis on the People’s Republic of China. We focused on the challenges created when U.S. government agencies, our federal research labs, and government contractors no longer have exclusive access to these advanced technologies.

This course included all that you would expect from a Stanford graduate-level class in the Masters in International Policy – comprehensive readings, guest lectures from current and former senior officials/experts, and written papers. What makes the class unique however, is that this is an experiential policy class. Students formed small teams and embarked on a quarter-long project that got them out of the classroom to 1) identify a priority national security challenge, and then to 2) validate the problem and propose a detailed solution tested against actual stakeholders in the technology and national security ecosystem.

The class was split into three parts. Part 1, weeks 1 through 4 covered international relations theories, strategies and policies around Great Power Competition specifically focused on the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the Communist Peoples Party (CCP). Part 2, weeks 5 through 8, dove into the commercial technologies: semiconductors, space, cyber, AI and Machine Learning, High Performance Computing, and Biotech. In between parts 1 and 2 of the class, the students had a midterm individual project. It required them to write a 2,000-word policy memo describing how a U.S. competitor is using a specific technology to counter U.S. interests and a proposal for how the U.S. should respond. (These policy memos were reviewed by Tarun Chhabra, the Senior Director for Technology and National Security at the National Security Council.)

Each week the students had to read 5-10 articles (see class readings here.) And each week we had guest speakers on great power competition, and technology and its impact on national power and lectures/class discussion.

Guest Speakers
In addition to the teaching team, the course drew on the experience and expertise of guest lecturers from industry and from across U.S. Government agencies to provide context and perspective on commercial technologies and national security.

Our class opened with three guest speakers; former U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis and the CIA’s CTO and COO Nand Mulchandani and Andy Makridis. The last class closed with a talk by Google ex-Chairman Eric Schmidt.

In the weeks in-between we had teaching team lectures followed by speakers that led discussions on the critical commercial technologies. For semiconductors, the White House Coordinator for the CHIPS Act – Ronnie Chatterji, and the CTO of Applied Materials – Om Nalamasu. For commercial tech integration and space, former Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) Director Mike Brown and B. General Bucky Butow – Director of the Space Portfolio. For Artificial Intelligence, Lt. Gen. (Ret) Jack Shanahan, former director of the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center. And for synthetic biology Stanford Professor Drew Endy – President, BioBricks Foundation.

Team-based Experiential Project
The third part of the class was unique – a quarter-long, team-based project. Students formed teams and developed hypotheses of how commercial technologies can be used in new and creative ways to help the U.S. wield its instruments of national power. And consistent with all our Gordian Knot Center classes, they got out of the classroom and interviewed 20+ beneficiaries, policy makers, and other key stakeholders testing their hypotheses and proposed solutions. At the end of the quarter, each of the teams gave a final “Lessons Learned” presentation and followed up with a 3,000 to 5,000-word team-written paper.

By the end of the class all the teams realized that the problem they had selected had morphed into something bigger, deeper, and much more interesting.

Team 1: Climate Change

Original Problem Statement: What combinations of technologies and international financial relationships should the US prioritize to mitigate climate change?

Final Problem Statement: How should the US manage China’s dominance in solar panels?

If you can’t see the presentation click here.

We knew that these students could write a great research paper. As we pointed out to them, while you can be the smartest person in the building, it’s unlikely that 1) all the facts are in the building, 2) you’re smarter than the collective intelligence sitting outside the building.

Jonah Cader: “Technology, Innovation and Great Power Competition (TIGPC) is that rare combination of the theoretical, tactical, and practical. Over 10 weeks, Blank, Felter, and Shah outline the complexities of modern geopolitical tensions and bring students up the learning curves of critical areas of technological competition, from semiconductors to artificial intelligence. Each week of the seminar is a crash course in a new domain, brought to life by rich discussion and an incredible slate of practitioners who live and breathe the content of TIGPC daily. Beyond the classroom, the course plunges students into getting “out of the building” to iterate quickly while translating learnings to the real world. Along the way the course acts as a strong call to public service.”

Team 2: Networks

Original Problem Statement: How might we implement a ubiquitous secure global access to the internet in order to help circumvent censorship in authoritarian regimes?

 Final Problem Statement: How can we create an open, free Internet and maintain effective lines of communication in Taiwan in preparation for a potential invasion?

If you can’t see the presentation click here

By week 2 of the class students formed teams around a specific technology challenge facing a US government agency and worked throughout the course to develop their own proposals to help the U.S. compete more effectively through new operational concepts, organizations, and/or strategies.

Jason Kim: “This course doesn’t just discuss U.S. national security issues. It teaches students how to apply an influential and proven methodology to rapidly develop solutions to our most challenging problems.”

Team 3: Acquisition

Original Problem Statement: How can the U.S. Department of Defense match or beat the speed of great power competitors in acquiring and integrating critical technologies?

Final Problem Statement: How can the U.S. Department of Defense deploy alternative funding mechanisms in parallel to traditional procurement vehicles to enable and incentivize the delivery of critical next-generation technology in under 5 years?

If you can’t see the presentation click here

We wanted to give our students hands-on experience on how to deeply understand a problem at the intersection of our country’s diplomacy, information, its military capabilities, economic strength, finance, intelligence, and law enforcement and dual-use technology. First by having them develop hypotheses about the problem; next by getting out of the classroom and talking to relevant stakeholders across government, industry, and academia to validate their assumptions; and finally by taking what they learned to propose and prototype solutions to these problems.

Matt Kaplan: “The TIGPC class was a highlight of my academic experience at Stanford. Over the ten week quarter, I learned a tremendous amount about the importance of technology in global politics from the three professors and from the experts in government, business, and academia who came to speak. The class epitomizes some of the best parts of my time here: the opportunity to learn from incredible, caring faculty and to work with inspiring classmates. Joe, Steve, Raj instilled in my classmates and me a fresh sense of excitement to work in public service.”

 Team 4: Wargames

Original Problem Statement: The U.S. needs a way, given a representative simulation, to rapidly explore a strategy for possible novel uses of existing platforms and weapons.

Final Problem Statement: Strategic wargames stand to benefit from a stronger integration of AI+ML but are struggling to find adoption and usage. How can this be addressed?

If you can’t see the presentation click here

We want our students to build the reflexes and skills to deeply understand a problem by gathering first-hand information and validating that the problem they are solving is the real problem, not a symptom of something else. Then, students began rapidly building minimal viable solutions (policy, software, hardware …) as a way to test and validate their understanding of both the problem and what it would take to solve it.

Etienne Reche-Ley: “Technology, Innovation and Great Power Competition gave me an opportunity to dive into a real world national security threat to the United States and understand the implications of it within the great power competition. Unlike any other class I have taken at Stanford, this class allowed me to take action on our problem about networks, censorship and the lack of free flow of information in authoritarian regimes, and gave me the chance to meet and learn from a multitude of experts on the topic. I finished this class with a deep understanding of our problem, a proposed actionable solution and a newfound interest in the intersection of technology and innovation as it applies to national defense. I am very grateful to have been part of this course, and it has inspired me to go a step further and pursue a career related to national security.”

Team 6: Disinformation

Original Problem Statement: Disinformation is a national security threat.

Final Problem Statement: The U.S.’s ability to close the disinformation response kill chain is hampered by a lack of coordination between U.S. government  agencies,  no clear ownership of the disinformation problem, and a lack of  clear guidelines on public-private partnerships.

If you can’t see the presentation click here

One other goal of the class was to continue to validate and refine our pedagogy of combining a traditional lecture class with an experiential project. We did this by tasking the students to 1) use what they learned from the lectures and 2) then test their assumptions outside the classroom, the external input they received would be a force multiplier. It would make the lecture material real, tangible and actionable. And we and they would end up with something quite valuable.

Shreyas Lakhtakia: “TIGPC is an interdisciplinary class like no other. It is a fabulous introduction to some of the most significant tech and geopolitical challenges and questions of the 21st century. The class, like the topics it covers, is incredible and ambitious – it’s a great way to level up your understanding of not just international policy, political theory and technology policy but also deep tech and the role of startups in projecting national power. If you’re curious about the future of the world and the role of the US in it, you won’t find a more unique course, a more dedicated teaching team or better speakers to hear from than this!”

Team 7: Quantum Technology

Original Problem Statement: China’s planned government investment in quantum dwarfs that of the U.S. by a factor of 10.

Final Problem Statement: The US quantum ecosystem does not generate enough awareness of opportunities to pursue careers in quantum that could catalyze industry growth.

If you can’t see the presentation click here

We knew we were asking a lot from our students. We were integrating a lecture class with a heavy reading list with the best practices of hypothesis testing from Lean Launchpad/Hacking for Defense/I-Corps. But I’ve yet to bet wrong in pushing students past what they think is reasonable. Most rise way above the occasion.

 Team 9: Lithium-Ion Batteries

Original Problem Statement: Supply and production of lithium-ion batteries is centered in China. How can the U.S. become competitive?

Final Problem Statement: China controls the processing of critical materials used for lithium-ion batteries. To regain control the DOE needs to incentivize short and long-term strategies to increase processing of critical materials and decrease dependence on lithium-ion batteries.

If you can’t see the presentation click here

All of our students put in extraordinary amount of work. Our students came from a diverse set of background and interests – from undergraduate sophomores to 5th year PhD’s – in a mix including international policy, economics, computer science, business, law and engineering. Some will go on to senior roles in State, Defense, policy or other agencies. Others will join or found the companies building new disruptive technologies. They’ll be the ones to determine what the world-order will look like for the rest of the century and beyond. Will it be a rules-based order where states cooperate to pursue a shared vision for a free and open region and where the sovereignty of all countries large and small is protected under international law? Or will it be an autocratic and dystopian future coerced and imposed by a neo-totalitarian regime?

This class changed the trajectory of many of our students. A number expressed newfound interest in exploring career options in the field of national security. Several will be taking advantage of opportunities provided by the Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation to further pursue their contribution to national security.

This course and our work at Stanford’s Gordian Knot Center would not be possible without the unrelenting support and guidance from Ambassador Mike McFaul and Professor Riitta Katila, GKC founding faculty and Principal Investigators, and the tenacity of David Hoyt, Gordian Knot Center Assistant Director.

Lessons Learned

  • We combined lecture and experiential learning so our students can act on problems not just admire them
    • The external input the students received was a force multiplier
    • It made the lecture material real, tangible and actionable
    • Pushing students past what they think is reasonable results in extraordinary output. Most rise way above the occasion
  • The class creates opportunities for our best and brightest to engage and address challenges at the nexus of technology, innovation and national security
    • The final presentations and papers from the class are proof that will happen

Filed under: Technology Innovation and Great Power Competition | 2 Comments »

Why The Pentagon Can’t Count: It’s Time to Reinvent the Audit

Posted on November 30, 2022 by steve blank

This article previously appeared in War on the Rocks.

In the past, headlines about the Pentagon failing its financial audit again would never have caught my attention. But having been in the middle of this conversation when I served on one of the Defense Department’s advisory boards, I understand why the Pentagon can’t count. The experience taught me a valuable lesson about innovation and imagination in large organizations, and the difference visionary leadership – or the lack of it – can make.

With audit costs approaching a billion dollars a year the Pentagon had an opportunity to lead in modernizing auditing. Instead it opted for more of the same.

Auditing the Department of Defense
By law, the Department of Defense has to provide Congress and the public with an assessment of where it spends its money and to provide transparency of its operations. A financial audit counts what the Department of Defense has, where it has it, and if they know where its money is being spent.

Auditing the Department of Defense is a massive undertaking. For one thing, it is the country’s largest employer, with 2.9 million people (1.3 million on active duty, 800,000 in the reserve components, and 770,000 civilians.) The audit has to count the location and condition of every piece of military equipment, property, inventory, and supplies. And there are a lot of them. The department has 643,900 assets, from buildings, to pipelines, roads, and fences located on over 4,860 sites, as well as 19,700 aircraft and over 290 battle force ships. To complicate the audit, the department has 326 different and separate financial management systems, 4,700 data warehouses and over 10,000 different and disconnected data management systems.

(BTW, just like in the private sector, financial audits and audits of contracts are separate. While the DoD Office of Inspector General is responsible for these financial audits of trillions of dollars of assets and liabilities, the Defense Contract Audit Agency is responsible for auditing the hundreds of billions of dollars of acquisition contracts. They have the same issues.)

This is the fifth year the Department has undergone a financial statement audit – and failed it. The audit was not a trivial effort, it required 1,600 auditors – 1,450 from public accounting firms and 150 from the Office of Inspector General. In 2019, the audit cost $428 million in auditing costs ($186 million to the auditors along with $242 million to audit support) and another $472 million to fix the issues the audit discovered.

Let’s Invent the Future of Audit
The Defense of Department’s 40-plus advisory boards are staffed by outsiders who can provide independent perspectives and advice. I sat on one of these boards, and our charter was to leverage private sector lessons to improve audit quality.

With defense spending on auditing approaching a billion dollars a year, it was clear it would take a decade or more to catch up to the audit standards of private companies. But no single company or even entire industry was spending this much money on auditing. And remarkably, the Defense Department seemed intent on doing the same thing year after year, just with more people and with a few more tools and processes to get incrementally better. It dawned on me that if we tried to look over the horizon, the department could audit faster, cheaper, and more effectively by inventing the future tools and techniques rather than repeating the past.

Nothing in our charter asked the advisory board to invent the future. But I found myself asking, “What if we could?” What if we could provide the defense department with new technology, new approaches to auditing, analytics practices, audit research, and standards, all while creating audit and data management research and a new generation of finance applications and vendors?

The Pentagon Once Led Business Innovation
I reminded my fellow advisory board members that in 1959, at the dawn of the computer age, the Defense Department was the largest user of computers for business applications.

However, there was no common business programing language. So rather than wait for one, the Defense Department led the effort to create one – the COBOL programming language. And 20 years later, it did the same for the ADA programming language.

With that history in mind, I proposed we lead again. And that we start an initiative for the 5th generation of audit practices (the Audit 5.0 Initiative) with machine learning, predictive analytics, Intelligent sampling and predictions. This initiative would also include automating ETL, predictive analytics, fraud detection, and a new generation of audit standards.

I pointed out that this program wouldn’t need more funds since the Department of Defense could allocate 10% of the $428M we were spending on auditors and fund SBIR (Small Business Innovation Research) programs in auditing/data management/finance to generate 5-10 new startups in this space each year. Simultaneously we could fund academic research, to incentivize research on Machine Learning as applied to Audit 5.0 challenges in finance, auditing and data management.

In addition, we could create new audit standards by working with existing government audit standards bodies such as (The Generally Accepted Government Auditing Standards (GAGAS), Yellow Book, the GAO’s Standards for Internal Control in the Federal Government, Green Book and the Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board (FASAB). We could collaborate with civilian audit standard bodies (ASB (Auditing Standards Board) and PCAOB (Public Company Accounting Oversight Board). Working together, the defense department could create the next generation of machine-driven and semiautomated standards. Furthermore, it could help the Independent Public Accounting firms (KPMG, EY, PwC, Deloitte, et al) create a new practice and make them partners in the Audit 5.0 initiative.

By investing 10 percent of the existing auditing budget over the next few years, these activities would create a defense audit center of excellence that would fund academic centers for advanced audit research, standup “future of audit” programs that would create new 5-10 startups each year, be the focal point for government an industry finance and audit standards, and create public-private partnerships rather than mandates.

Spinning up these activities up would dramatically reduce the department’s audit costs, standardize its financial management environment, and provide confidence in their budget, auditability, and transparency. And as a bonus, it would create a new generation of finance, audit and data management startups, funded by private capital.

The Road Not Taken
I was in awe of my fellow advisory board members. They had spent decades in senior roles in finance and accounting in both the public and private sectors. Yet, when I pitched this idea, they politely listened to what I had to say and then moved on to their agenda – providing the DoD with Incremental improvements.

At the time I was disappointed, but not surprised. An advisory board is only as good as what it’s being chartered and staffed to do. If they are being asked to provide a 10 percent incremental advice, they’ll do so. But if they’re asked for revolutionary i.e. 10x advice, they can change the world. But that requires a different charter, leadership, people, innovation, and imagination.

In the end, the Department of Defense, the largest purchaser of accounting services in the world, whiffed a chance to be the leader in creating the next generation of audit tools and services, not only for financial audits, but for the hundreds of billions of dollars of acquisition contracts the Defense Contract Audit Agency audits. By now the department could have audit tools driven by machine learning algorithms, ferreting out fraud by vendors or contractors and anticipating programs that are at risk.

Lessons Learned

  • If you only get what you ask for you haven’t hired people with imagination
    • America’s defense leaders ought to ask and act for transformational, contrarian and disruptive advice
    • And ensure they have the will and organizations to act on it
  • Move requests for advice for incremental improvements to the consulting firms that currently serve the Defense Department
  • Defense leaders need to consider whether spending a billion dollars a year for an audit is causing the department to become appreciably more efficient or better managed
    • Or whether there might be a better way

Filed under: Technology Innovation and Great Power Competition | 5 Comments »

Lessons for the DoD – From Ukraine and China

Posted on May 3, 2022 by steve blank

 Portions of this post previously appeared in War On the Rocks.

Looking at a satellite image of Ukraine online I realized it was from Capella Space – one of our Hacking for Defense student teams who now has 7 satellites in orbit.

National Security is Now Dependent on Commercial Technology
They’re not the only startup in this fight. An entire wave of new startups and scaleups are providing satellite imagery and analysis, satellite communications, and unmanned aerial vehicles supporting the struggle.

For decades, satellites that took detailed pictures of Earth were only available to governments and the high-resolution images were classified. Today, commercial companies have their own satellites providing unclassified imagery. The government buys and distributes commercial images from startups to supplement their own and shares them with Ukraine as part of a broader intelligence-sharing arrangement that the head of Defense Intelligence Agency described as “revolutionary.” By the end of the decade, there will be 1000 commercial satellites for every U.S. government satellite in orbit.

At the onset of the war in Ukraine, Russia launched a cyber-attack on Viasat’s KA-SAT satellite, which supplies Internet across Europe, including to Ukraine. In response, to a (tweeted) request from Ukraine’s vice prime minister, Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite company shipped thousands of their satellite dishes and got Ukraine back on the Internet. Other startups are providing portable cell towers – “backpackable” and fixed.  When these connect via satellite link, they can provide phone service and WIFI capability. Another startup is providing a resilient, mesh local area network for secure tactical communications supporting ground units.

Drone technology was initially only available to national governments and militaries but is now democratized to low price points and available as internet purchases. In Ukraine, drones from startups are being used as automated delivery vehicles for resupply, and for tactical reconnaissance to discover where threats are. When combined with commercial satellite imagery, this enables pinpoint accuracy to deliver maximum kinetic impact in stopping opposing forces.

Equipment from large military contractors and other countries is also part of the effort. However, the equipment listed above is available commercially off-the-shelf, at dramatically cheaper prices than what’s offered by the large existing defense contractors, and developed and delivered in a fraction of the time. The Ukraine conflict is demonstrating the changing character of war such that low-cost emerging commercial technology is extremely effective when deployed against a larger 20th-century industrialized force that Russia is fielding.

While we should celebrate the organizations that have created and fielded these systems, the battle for the Ukraine illustrates much larger issues in the Department of Defense.

For the first time ever our national security is inexorably intertwined with commercial technology (drones, AI, machine learning, autonomy, biotech, cyber, semiconductors, quantum, high-performance computing, commercial access to space, et al.) And as we’re seeing on the Ukrainian battlefield they are changing the balance of power.

The DoD’s traditional suppliers of defense tools, technologies, and weapons – the prime contractors and federal labs – are no longer the leaders in these next-generation technologies – drones, AI, machine learning, semiconductors, quantum, autonomy, biotech, cyber, quantum, high performance computing, et al. They know this and know that weapons that can be built at a fraction of the cost and upgraded via software will destroy their existing business models.

Venture capital and startups have spent 50 years institutionalizing the rapid delivery of disruptive innovation. In the U.S., private investors spent $300 billion last year to fund new ventures that can move with the speed and urgency that the DoD now requires. Meanwhile China has been engaged in a Civil/Military Fusion program since 2015 to harness these disruptive commercial technologies for its national security needs.

China – Civil/Military Fusion
Every year the Secretary of Defense has to issue a formal report to Congress: Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China. Six pages of this year’s report describe how China is combining its military-civilian sectors as a national effort for the PRC to develop a “world-class” military and become a world leader in science and technology. A key part of Beijing’s strategy includes developing and acquiring advanced dual-use technology. It’s worth thinking about what this means – China is not just using its traditional military contractors to build its defense ecosystem; they’re mobilizing their entire economy – commercial plus military suppliers. And we’re not.

DoD’s Civil/Military Orphan-Child – the Defense Innovation Unit
In 2015, before China started its Civil/Military effort, then-Secretary of Defense Ash Carter, saw the need for the DoD to understand, embrace and acquire commercial technology. To do so he started the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU). With offices in Silicon Valley, Austin, Boston, Chicago and Washington, DC, this is the one DoD organization with the staffing and mandate to match commercial startups or scaleups to pressing national security problems. DIU bridges the divide between DOD requirements and the commercial technology needed to address them with speed and urgency. It accelerates the connection of commercial technology to the military. Just as importantly, DIU helps the Department of Defense learn how to innovate at the same speed as tech-driven companies.

Many of the startups providing Ukraine satellite imagery and analysis, satellite communications, and unmanned aerial vehicles were found by the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU). Given that DIU is the Department of Defense’s most successful organization in developing and acquiring advanced dual-use technology, one would expect the department to scale the Defense Innovation Unit by a factor of ten. (Two years ago, the House Armed Services Committee in its Future of Defense Task Force report recommended exactly that—a 10X increase in budget.) The threats are too imminent and stakes too high not to do so.

So what happened?

Congress cut their budget by 20%.

And their well-regarded director just resigned in frustration because the Department is not resourcing DIU nor moving fast enough or broadly enough in adopting commercial technology.

Why? The Defense Ecosystem is at a turning point. Defense innovation threatens entrenched interests. Given that the Pentagon budget is essentially fixed, creating new vendors and new national champions of the next generation of defense technologies becomes a zero-sum game.

The Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) had no advocates in its chain of command willing to go to bat for it, let alone scale it.

The Department of Defense has world-class people and organization for a world that no longer exists
The Pentagon’s relationship with startups and commercial companies, already an arms-length one, is hindered by a profound lack of understanding about how the commercial innovation ecosystem works and its failure of imagination about what venture and private equity funded innovation could offer. In the last few years new venture capital and private equity firms have raised money to invest in dual-use startups. New startups focused on national security have sprung up and they and their investors have been banging on the closed doors of the defense department.

If we want to keep pace with our adversaries, we need to stop acting like we can compete with one hand tied behind our back. We need a radical reinvention of our civil/military innovation relationship. This would use Department of Defense funding, private capital, dual-use startups, existing prime contractors and federal labs in a new configuration that could look like this:

Create a new defense ecosystem encompassing startups, and mid-sized companies at the bleeding edge, prime contractors as integrators of advanced technology, federally funded R&D centers refocused on areas not covered by commercial tech (nuclear and hypersonics). Make it permanent by creating an innovation doctrine/policy.

Reorganize DoD Research and Engineering to allocate its budget and resources equally between traditional sources of innovation and new commercial sources of innovation.

  • Scale new entrants to the defense industrial base in dual-use commercial tech – AI/ML, Quantum, Space, drones, autonomy, biotech, underwater vehicles, shipyards, etc. that are not the traditional vendors. Do this by picking winners. Don’t give out door prizes. Contracts should be >$100M so high-quality venture-funded companies will play. And issue debt/loans to startups.

Reorganize DoD Acquisition and Sustainment to create and buy from new 21st century arsenals – new shipyards, drone manufacturers, etc. that can make 1,000’s of extremely low cost, attritable systems – “the small, the agile and the many.”

  • Acquire at Speed. Today, the average Department of Defense major acquisition program takes anywhere from nine to 26 years to get a weapon in the hands of a warfighter. DoD needs a requirements, budgeting and acquisition process that operates at commercial speed (18 months or less) which is 10x faster than DoD procurement cycles. Instead of writing requirements, the department should rapidly assess solutions and engage warfighters in assessing and prototyping commercial solutions. We’ll know we’ve built the right ecosystem when a significant number of major defense acquisition programs are from new entrants.

  • Acquire with a commercially oriented process. Congress has already granted the Department of Defense “Other Transaction Authority” (OTA) as a way to streamline acquisitions so they do not need to use Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR). DIU has created a “Commercial Solutions Opening” to mirror a commercial procurement process that leverages OTA. DoD could be applying Commercial Solutions Openings on a much faster and broader scale.

Integrate and create incentives for the Venture Capital/Private Equity ecosystem to invest at scale. The most important incentive would be for DoD to provide significant contracts for new entrants. (One new entrant which DIU introduced, Anduril, just received a follow-on contract for $1 billion. This should be one of many such contracts and not an isolated example.) More examples could include: matching dollars for national security investments (similar to the SBIR program but for investors), public/private partnership investment funds, incentivize venture capital funds with no-carry loans (debt funding) to, or tax holidays and incentives – to get $10’s of billions of private investment dollars in technology areas of national interest.

Buy where we can; build where we must. Congress mandated that the Department of Defense should use commercial off-the-shelf technology wherever possible, but the department fails to do this (see industry letter to the Department of Defense).

Coordinate with Allies. Expand the National Security Innovation Base (NSIB) to an Allied Security Innovation Base. Source commercial technology from allies.

This is a politically impossible problem for the Defense Department to solve alone. Changes at this scale will require Congressional and executive office action. Hard to imagine in the polarized political environment. But not impossible.

Put Different People in Charge and reorganize around this new ecosystem. The threats, speed of change, and technologies the United States faces in this century require radically different mindsets and approaches than those it faced in the 20th century. Today’s leaders in the DoD, executive branch and Congress haven’t fully grasped the size, scale, and opportunity of the commercial innovation ecosystem or how to build innovation processes to move with the speed and urgency to match the pace China has set.

Change is hard – on the people and organizations inside the DoD who’ve spent years operating with one mindset to be asked to pivot to a new one.

But America’s adversaries have exploited the boundaries and borders between its defense and commercial and economic interests. Current approaches to innovation across the government — both in the past and under the current administration —  are piecemeal, incremental, increasingly less relevant, and insufficient.

These are not problems of technology. It takes imagination, vision and the willingness to confront the status quo. So far, all are currently lacking.

Russia’s Black Sea flagship Moskva on the bottom of the ocean and the thousands of its destroyed tanks illustrate the consequences of a defense ecosystem living in the past. We need transformation not half-measures. The U.S. Department of Defense needs to change.

Historically, major defense reforms have come from inside the DoD, at other times Congress (National Security Act of 1947, Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986) and others from the President (Roosevelt’s creation of the Joint Chiefs in 1942, Eisenhower and the Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1958.)

It may be that the changes needed are so broad that the DoD can’t make them and Congress needs to act. If so, it’s their time to step up.

Carpe diem. Seize the day.

Filed under: Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation, Technology, Technology Innovation and Great Power Competition, Technology Innovation and Modern War | 3 Comments »

Technology, Innovation, and Great Power Competition  – Wrap Up

Posted on January 11, 2022 by steve blank

This article first appeared in West Point’s Modern War Institute.

We just had our final session of our Technology, Innovation, and Great Power Competition class. Joe Felter, Raj Shah and I designed the class to give our students insights on how commercial technology (AI, machine learning, autonomy, cyber, quantum, semiconductors, access to space, biotech, hypersonics, and others) will shape how we employ all the elements of national power (our influence and footprint on the world stage).

(Catch up with the class by reading our intro to the class, and summaries of Classes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 6, 7 and 8.)

This class has four parts that were like most lecture classes in international policy:

  • Weekly Readings – 5-10 articles/week
  • 20+ guest speakers on technology and its impact on national power – prior secretaries of defense and state, current and prior National Security council members, four-star generals who lead service branches
  • Lectures/Class discussion
  • Midterm individual project – a 2,000-word policy memo that describes how a U.S. competitor is using a specific technology to counter U.S. interests and a proposal how the U.S. should respond

The fifth part of the class was unique.

  • A quarter-long, team-based final project. Students developed hypotheses of how commercial technologies can be used in new and creative ways to help the U.S. wield its instruments of national power. And then they got out of the classroom and interviewed 20+ beneficiaries, policy makers, and other key stakeholders testing their hypotheses and proposed solutions.

At the end of the quarter, each of the teams gave a final “Lessons Learned” presentation with a follow-up a 3,000 to 5,000-word team-written paper.

By the end the class all the teams realized that the problem they had selected had morphed into something bigger, deeper and much more interesting.

Team Army Venture Capital

Original problem statement: the U.S. needs to reevaluate and improve its public venture capital relationship with companies with dual-use technologies.

Final problem statement: the DoD needs to reevaluate and improve its funding strategies and partnerships with dual-use mid-stage private companies.

If you can’t see the presentation click here.

We knew that these students could write a great research paper. As we pointed out to them, while you can be the smartest person in the building, it’s unlikely that 1) all the facts are in the building, 2) you’re smarter than the collective intelligence sitting outside the building.

Team Conflicted Capital

Original problem statement: Chinese investment in US startups with critical technologies poses a threat to US military capabilities, but the lack of transparency in venture capital makes it challenging to track them.

Final problem statement: Chinese adversarial venture capital investments in U.S. dual-use startups continue to threaten US military capabilities across critical technologies, but the scope of the problem is relatively small. VCs and entrepreneurs can play a role in addressing the challenge by shunning known sources of adversarial capital.

If you can’t see the presentation click here.

By week 2 of the class students formed teams around a specific technology challenge facing a US government agency and worked throughout the course to develop their own proposals to help the U.S. compete more effectively through new operational concepts, organizations, and/or strategies.

Team Aurora

Original Problem Statement: How can the U.S. employ its cyber capabilities to provide the populace of China with unrestricted Internet access to bolster civil society against CCP crackdowns, in order to pressure the PRC, spread American liberal values, and uphold U.S. freedom of action in the information domain?

Final Problem Statement: How does the USG leverage a soft-power information campaign to support Hong Kong residents’ right to self-determination and democratic governance without placing individuals at undue risk (of prosecution as foreign agents under the National Security Law)?

If you can’t see the presentation click here.

We wanted to give our students hands-on experience on how to deeply understand a problem at the intersection of our country’s diplomacy, information, its military capabilities, economic strength, finance, intelligence, and law enforcement and dual-use technology. First by having them develop hypotheses about the problem; next by getting out of the classroom and talking to relevant stakeholders across government, industry, and academia to validate their assumptions; and finally by taking what they learned to propose and prototype solutions to these problems.

Team ShortCircuit

Original Problem Statement: U.S. semiconductor procurement is heavily dependent on TSMC, which creates a substantial vulnerability in the event a PRC invasion of Taiwan, or other kinetic disruptions in the Indo-Pacific.

Final Problem Statement: How should the U.S. Government augment the domestic semiconductor workforce through education and innovation initiatives to increase its semiconductor sector competitiveness?

If you can’t see the presentation click here. 

We want our students to build the reflexes and skills to deeply understand a problem by gathering first-hand information and validating that the problem they are solving is the real problem, not a symptom of something else. Then, students began rapidly building minimal viable solutions (policy, software, hardware …) as a way to test and validate their understanding of both the problem and what it would take to solve it.

Team Drone

Original Problem Statement: Drones can be used as a surprise element in an amphibious assault to overwhelm defenses. In a potential Taiwan Strait Crisis, there is a need for a low-cost and survivable counter-drone system to defend Taiwan.

Final Problem Statement: Taiwan needs a robust and survivable command and control system to effectively and quickly bring the right asset to the right place at the right time during an invasion.

If you can’t see the presentation click here.

One other goal of the class was testing a teaching team hypothesis – that we could turn a lecture class into one that gave back more in output than we put in. That by tasking the students to 1) use what they learned from the lectures and 2) then test their assumptions outside the classroom, the external input they received would be a force multiplier. It would make the lecture material real, tangible and actionable. And we and they would end up with something quite valuable.

Team Apollo

Original Problem Statement: The Space Force must leverage commercial innovation and establish a trained, experienced acquisition workforce that will deliver innovation impact that the Space Force requires.

Final Problem Statement: The United States Space Force lacks the supply chain and rapid launch capabilities needed to respond to contingencies in space. The private sector possesses these capabilities, but is not being adequately leveraged or incentivized.

If you can’t see the presentation click here. 

We knew we were asking a lot from our students. We were integrating a lecture class with a heavy reading list with the best practices of hypothesis testing from Lean Launchpad/Hacking for Defense/I-Corps. But I’ve yet to bet wrong in pushing students past what they think is reasonable. Most rise way above the occasion.

Given this was the first time we taught integrated lectures and projects our student reviews ranged from the “we must have paid them to write this” to “did they take the same class as everyone else?” (Actually it was, let’s fix the valid issues they raised.)

A few student quotes:

“This is a MUST TAKE [caps theirs]. The professors and teaching team are second to none, and the guest speakers are truly amazing. This course is challenging, but you truly get out of it what you put into it, and you will learn so much crucial and interesting material.”

“THIS IS A FANTASTIC COURSE! [caps theirs]. The material was excellent, the instruction from legendary professions was top notch and the reading material was timely, interesting, and relevant. Anyone who is interested in geopolitics and technology innovation needs to take this course. Not only that, but each week features a different guest speaker that is usually from the highest levels of US government and is THE expert in the subject for that week’s course. Really amazing experience getting to listen to and have Q&A with such incredible people.”

Team Catena

Original Problem Statement: China’s cryptocurrency ban presents the U.S. with an opportunity to influence blockchain development, attract technical talent, and leverage digital asset technology.

Final Problem Statement: CCP’s economic coercion makes countries such as Australia dependent on China’s economy and vulnerable to the party’s will. The U.S. must analyze which key Australian industries are most threatened and determine viable alternative trading partners.

If you can’t see the presentation click here.

A few more student quotes:

“This is hands-down one of the best courses I’ve taken at Stanford. From the moment I walked into the door, I was stunned by both the caliber of people you’re sharing oxygen with in that room, and how welcoming and accessible they are. Despite it being the first offering of this course, everything was well-organized, and our team was always supported with a wealth of resources and access we needed to get our policy deliverables to, alongside a healthy dose of near-constant feedback and encouragement from the teaching team. Readings were engaging and insightful, and the guest list we had was simply unbelievable- Mattis, McFaul, Rice, Pottinger, among several others in the White House, Pentagon, and beyond. There’s a real feeling that everyone who worked on this course wants you to grow as a student but also teach them what you’re learning.

Beware Steve Blank- he can be harsh and aggressive but exemplifies the ‘rude but life-saving doctor’ trope. I’ve learned more from responding to a single Blank cold-question in lecture than from three entire quarters of applied math at Stanford. Be sure to get started early on your teamwork and talk to the lecturers as much as you can- this really is a ‘you get as much as you give’ course, and the highest returns are to be had by being tenacious, loud, and unabashed in your questioning.
And, for God’s sake, don’t draw cartoons on your final presentation- the JCOS might be watching.

“DO NOT TAKE THIS COURSE! This class is a complete waste of time.“

“This was the worst class I took at Stanford “

While the positive feedback accolades for the class were rewarding, several comments identified areas we can improve:

  • Letting the students know upfront the workload and unique format of the class
  • Better organization and timing
    • Readings: be much clearer on which ones are mandatory vs optional
    • Clarify details, flows and objectives for each class
    • Tie speakers to projects / student presentations
  • Make weekly office hours mandatory to ensure all students receive regular professor/student interaction, feedback and guidance from week 1

All of our students put in extraordinary amount of work. Our students, a mix between international policy and engineering, will go off to senior roles in State, Defense, policy and to the companies building new disruptive technologies. They will be the ones to determine what the world-order will look like for the rest of the century and beyond. Will it be a rules-based order where states cooperate to pursue a shared vision for a free and open region and where the sovereignty of all countries large and small is protected under international law? Or will it be an autocratic and dystopian future coerced and imposed by a neo-totalitarian regime?

This class changed the trajectory of many of our students. A number expressed newfound interest in exploring career options in the field of national security. Several will be taking advantage of opportunities provided by the Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation to further pursue their contribution to national security.

Lessons Learned

  • We could turn a lecture class into one that gave back more in output than we put in.
  • Tasking the students to test their assumptions outside the classroom, the external input they received was a force multiplier
    • It made the lecture material real, tangible and actionable
  • Pushing students past what they think is reasonable results in extraordinary output. Most rise way above the occasion
  • The output of the class convinced us that the work of students like these could materially add to the safety and security of the free world
  • It is a national security imperative to create greater opportunities for our best and brightest to engage and address challenges at the nexus of technology, innovation and national security

Note: Inspired by our experience with this course, we decided to increase the focus of Stanford’s Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation on developing and empowering the extraordinary and largely untapped potential of students across the university and beyond.

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Technology, Innovation, and Great Power Competition – Class 8 – Cyber

Posted on November 26, 2021 by steve blank

This article first appeared in West Point’s Modern War Institute.

We just completed the eighth week of our new national security class at Stanford – Technology, Innovation and Great Power Competition. Joe Felter, Raj Shah and I designed the class to cover how technology will shape the character and employment of all instruments of national power.

In class 1, we learned that national power is the sum of all the resources available to a state to pursue its national objectives and interests. This power is wielded through a combination of a country’s diplomacy, information, its military capabilities, economic strength, finance, intelligence, and law enforcement. These instruments of national power employed in a “whole of government approach” to advance a state’s interests are known by the acronym DIME-FIL.

Class 2 focused on China, the U.S.’s primary great power competitor. China is using all elements of its national power, e.g. information/ intelligence, its military might and economic strength as well as exploiting Western finance and technology. China’s goal is to challenge and overturn the U.S.-led liberal international order and replace it with its own neo-totalitarian model where China emerges as the dominant regional and global power.

The third class focused on Russia, which since 2014 has asserted itself as a competing great power. We learned how Russia pursues security and economic interests in parallel with its ideological aims.

The fourth class shifted our focus to the impact commercial technologies have on the instruments of national power (DIME-FIL). The first technology we examined was semiconductors, and the U.S. dependence on TSMC in Taiwan, for its most advanced logic chips. This is problematic as China claims Taiwan is a province of China.

In the fifth class we examined the impact that AI and Machine Learning will continue to have on the capabilities and employment of DIME-FIL. We heard from the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC), the focal point of the DOD AI strategy; and from the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) – a DoD organization that contracts with commercial companies to solve national security problems.

In class six we discussed unmanned systems and autonomy and how the advent of these weapons will change operational concepts and the face of war.

Class seven looked at the Second Space Age, how our military and civilian economy rely on assets in space, and how space is now a contested environment, with China and Russia capable of disabling/destroying our satellites

Today’s class: Cyber

Catch up with the class by reading our intro to the class, and summaries of Classes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 6 and 7

 

Required readings

Case Study for Class

Competition in Cyber Space

Cyber Attacks / Cyber Warfare

IP & Protected Personal Information Theft

Political Interference

Reading Assignment Questions

Pick one of the below questions and answer in approximately 100 words, based on the required readings. Please note that this assignment will be graded and count towards course participation. 

  1. What is the U.S. Cyber Command’s doctrinal approach to competing in the cyber domain? Do you agree with the current doctrine? Why or why not? Would you do anything differently?
  2. Of the different types of cyber threats presented in this week’s readings (cyberattacks, PPI and IP theft, and political interference), which do you think presents the greatest threat to U.S. interests and why? What should the U.S do to address that threat? Be specific if your recommendations are for the government or private sector.

Class 8 – Guest Speaker

Dr. Michael Sulmeyer is a Senior Adviser, USCYBERCOM (Cyber Command). He was the former Senior Director for Cyber at the National Security Council. The former Cyber Project Director at the Harvard Kennedy School-Belfer Center. He was a past Director, Plans and Operations, for Cyber Policy in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Previously, he worked on arms control and the maintenance of strategic stability between the United States, Russia, and China.

Cyber Command formed in 2010 and is one of the eleven unified combatant commands of the United States Department of Defense. It’s commanded by a four-star general, General Paul Nakasone who is also the director of the National Security Agency and chief of the Central Security Service. It has three main missions: (1) defending the DoD information systems, (2) supporting joint force commanders with cyberspace operations, and (3) defending the nation from significant cyberattacks.

Dr. Sulmeyer has written, “A focus on cyber-deterrence is understandable but misplaced. Deterrence aims to change the calculations of adversaries by persuading them that the risks of an attack outweigh the rewards or that they will be denied the benefits they seek. But in seeking merely to deter enemies, the United States finds itself constantly on the back foot. Instead, the United States should be pursuing a more active cyberpolicy, one aimed not at deterring enemies but at disrupting their capabilities. In cyberwarfare, Washington should recognize that the best defense is a good offense.

In countries where technology companies are willing to cooperate with the U.S. government (or with requests from their own government), a phone call to the right cloud provider or Internet service provider (ISP) could result in getting bad actors kicked off the Internet.

U.S. hackers could pursue a campaign of erasing computers at scale, disabling accounts and credentials used by hackers to attack, and cutting off access to services so it is harder to compromise innocent systems to conduct their attacks.”

Our national defense cyber policy has now moved to “persistent engagement.” Defending forward as close as possible to the origin of adversary activity extends our reach to expose adversaries’ weaknesses, learn their intentions and capabilities, and counter attacks close to their origins. Continuous engagement imposes tactical friction and strategic costs on our adversaries, compelling them to shift resources to defense and reduce attacks. We will pursue attackers across networks and systems to render most malicious cyber and cyber-enabled activity inconsequential while achieving greater freedom of maneuver to counter and contest dangerous adversary activity before it impairs our national power.

Lecture 8

If you can’t see the lecture 8 slides click here.

Lessons Learned

  • Cyber Command’s role is to:
    • defend the DoD information systems
    • support joint force commanders with cyberspace operations, and
    • defend the nation from significant cyberattacks
  • Cyber Command has evolved from a reactive, defensive posture to a proactive posture called “persistent engagement”


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Technology, Innovation, and Great Power Competition – Class 7 – Space

Posted on November 23, 2021 by steve blank

This article first appeared in West Point’s Modern War Institute.

We just completed the seventh week of our new national security class at Stanford – Technology, Innovation and Great Power Competition. Joe Felter, Raj Shah and I designed the class to cover how technology will shape the character and employment of all instruments of national power.

In class 1, we learned that national power is the sum of all the resources available to a state to pursue its national objectives and interests. This power is wielded through a combination of a country’s diplomacy, information, its military capabilities, economic strength, finance, intelligence, and law enforcement. These instruments of national power employed in a “whole of government approach” to advance a state’s interests are known by the acronym DIME-FIL.

Class 2 focused on China, the U.S.’s primary great power competitor. China is using all elements of its national power, e.g. information/ intelligence, its military might and economic strength as well as exploiting Western finance and technology. China’s goal is to challenge and overturn the U.S.-led liberal international order and replace it with its own neo-totalitarian model where China emerges as the dominant regional and global power.

The third class focused on Russia, which since 2014 has asserted itself as a competing great power. We learned how Russia pursues security and economic interests in parallel with its ideological aims.

The fourth class shifted our focus to the impact commercial technologies have on the instruments of national power (DIME-FIL). The first technology we examined was semiconductors, and the U.S. dependence on TSMC in Taiwan, for its most advanced logic chips.

In the fifth class we examined the impact that AI and Machine Learning will continue to have on the capabilities and employment of DIME-FIL.

In class six we discussed unmanned systems and autonomy and how the advent of these weapons will change operational concepts and the face of war.

Today’s class: The Second Space Age: Great Power Competition in Space.

Catch up with the class by reading our intro to the class, and summaries of Classes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 

Required readings

The Cold War: Space Race 1.0

Space as a Domain

Age of Great Power Competition: Space Race 2.0

America’s Space Forces

Space Threats & Non-State Actors

Reading Assignment Questions

Pick one of the below questions and answer in approximately 100 words, based on the required readings. 

  1. Describe America’s space assets and the role of the U.S. Space Force in protecting and employing those assets. As the U.S. Space Force continues to develop, what changes in strategy and/or addition to its portfolio of responsibilities would you recommend?
  2. What is the greatest current threat to U.S. interests in space? What recommendations would you have for the U.S. and its partners to mitigate that threat?

Class 7 – Guest Speaker

Our guest speaker was General John Raymond, Chief of Space Operations. He is the first Chief of Space Operations, U.S. Space Force. Space Force has three major commands — Space Operations Command, Space Systems Command, and Space Training and Readiness Command.

The Space Force was born as a separate service in December 2019. Previously General Raymond led re-establishment of U.S. Space Command as 11th U.S. combatant command, and was for a year the head of both a service (Space Force) and a combatant command (Space Command).

Raymond said a focus for the Space Force is being lean and fast, innovative and unified.

Space was once considered “benign,” largely uninhabited except by the United States and Russia and the Soviet Union. Today it is far more crowded and dangerous. Raymond pointed out that the ability to operate in space is critical not only to protect U.S. security, but also to power the U.S. and global economy, communications, transportation and other essential functions of everyday life.

“Space is clearly a warfighting domain and we’re convinced that if deterrence were to fail, we’re going to have to fight and win the battle for space superiority,” he said.

Lecture 7

If you can’t see the lecture 7 slides click here.

Next Week: Cyber

Lessons Learned

  • Our military depends on our assets in space (satellites) for communication, navigation, situational awareness (via photo, radar and electronic intelligence satellites) warning and targeting
  • Our civilian economy also depends on space assets for GPS and communication
  • Space is now a contested environment with China and Russia capable of disabling/destroying our satellites
    • Using directed energy (lasers), cyber, electronic warfare, ground or space-based kinetic weapons


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Technology, Innovation, and Great Power Competition – Class 6 – Unmanned Systems and Autonomy

Posted on November 16, 2021 by steve blank

This article first appeared in West Point’s Modern War Institute.

We just completed the sixth week of our new national security class at Stanford – Technology, Innovation and Great Power Competition. Joe Felter, Raj Shah and I designed the class to cover how technology will shape the character and employment of all instruments of national power.

In class 1, we learned that national power is the sum of all the resources available to a state to pursue its national objectives and interests. This power is wielded through a combination of a country’s diplomacy, information, its military capabilities, economic strength, finance, intelligence, and law enforcement. These instruments of national power employed in a “whole of government approach” to advance a state’s interests are known by the acronym DIME-FIL.

Class 2 focused on China, the U.S.’s primary great power competitor. China is using all elements of its national power, e.g. information/ intelligence, its military might and economic strength as well as exploiting Western finance and technology. China’s goal is to challenge and overturn the U.S.-led liberal international order and replace it with its own neo-totalitarian model where China emerges as the dominant regional and global power.

The third class focused on Russia, which since 2014 has asserted itself as a competing great power. We learned how Russia pursues security and economic interests in parallel with its ideological aims.

The fourth class shifted our focus to the impact commercial technologies have on the instruments of national power (DIME-FIL). The first technology we examined were semiconductors, and the U.S. dependence on TSMC in Taiwan, for its most advanced logic chips. This is problematic as China claims Taiwan is a province of China.

In the fifth class we examined the impact that AI and Machine Learning will continue to have on the capabilities and employment of DIME-FIL. We heard from the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC), the focal point of the DOD AI strategy; and from the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) – a DoD organization that contracts with commercial companies to solve national security problems.

Today’s class: Unmanned Platforms and Autonomy

Catch up with the class by reading our intro to the class, and summaries of Classes 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5

Required Readings

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) & Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS)

Unmanned Surface Vessel (USV) / Unmanned Undersea Vessel (UUV)

U.S. Unmanned Warfare Concepts

China Unmanned Warfare Concepts

Use of Drones in Nagorno-Karabakh

Reading Assignment Questions

Pick one of the below questions and answer in approximately 100 words, based on the required readings.

  1. Describe how the advent of autonomous weapon systems (i.e. drones) has changed the American way of war to date. What changes would you recommend America adopt as autonomous systems continue to develop?
  2. Pick one domain of war (e.g. air, land, sea, subsea, space, etc.). How does the proliferation of autonomous weapon systems to great powers, lesser powers, or non-state actors (pick one of the three) threaten America’s traditional military advantages in that domain?

Class 6 – Guest Speakers and Autonomy Panel

This class had seven guest speakers on unmanned systems and autonomy.

Our first guest speaker was Rear Admiral Lorin Selby, Chief of Naval Research, United States Navy. Admiral Selby is responsible for the Naval Research Enterprise. It is the “venture capital” of the Navy and Marine Corps. It’s made up of ONR – the Office of Naval Research, ONR Global, the Naval Research Laboratory, and Special Projects (PMR 51.)

(Founded in August 1946, ONR provided support of research at universities when WWII government funding to universities had dried up. Fred Terman, Stanford’s dean of engineering, received ONR’s first research grants for electronics and microwaves. These grants funded the Stanford Electronics Research Laboratory and kick-started innovation in what would become Silicon Valley.) Fast forward to this decade and ONR funded our first Stanford Hacking for Defense classes and is the first funder of the Stanford Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation.

RADM Selby described the role of the  Chief of Naval Research, the types of innovation, the role of ONR in capturing new/relevant ideas and pulling them in fast enough to compete with adversaries, but not disrupt the functionality of the Navy.

Our next guest was Maynard Holliday the DoD Director of Defense Research and Engineering for Modernization (5G; Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning; Autonomy; Biotechnology; Cyber; Directed Energy; Fully Networked Command, Control, and Communications; Hypersonics; Microelectronics; Quantum Science; and Space). He described the role of his office as similar to DARPA. His 11 principal directors lay out the technical roadmaps for the DoD and help transition the technologies into operational use.

The principal DoD Modernization director for autonomy, Dr. Jaret C. Riddick, then joined us. He helped the class understand the DoD definition of Autonomy, the Lines of Effort the DoD is actively pursuing, and why it was important.

Lecture 6

If you can’t see the lecture 6 slides click here.

In the Department of Defense unmanned systems and autonomy are moving ahead rapidly. We gave the students a feel for the scope of the activities in two panel sessions.

Panel 1 – Autonomy/Unmanned Systems Research and Engineering

RADM Selby, Mr. Holliday, and Mr. Riddick joined a panel discussion on how their organizations set their research priorities and investment strategies. They discussed:

  1. What time horizon their organizations consider when determining which technologies to invest in
  2. How these investment strategies and time horizons compare and contrast with the same considerations made by China and Russia
  3. What the future of autonomous systems looks like. What the largest gains their organizations hope to make with investments in autonomy
  4. What ethical considerations they take into account when making technology investments Whether China and/or Russia have similar or different ethical considerations. How these ethical frameworks affect America’s ability to compete

Panel 2 – An Application of Autonomy – the Navy Unmanned Task Force

Four other experts on Autonomy in defense joined us for a discussion of the Vice Chief of Naval Operations Unmanned Task Force: Michael Stewart, Director of the US Navy Unmanned Task Force and Deputy Director Integrated Warfare; Bradley Garber, Deputy Director/Principal Civilian Advisor to the Vice Chief of Naval Operations; Dr. Jason Stack,  the Office of Naval Research Portfolio Manager for Autonomy; and Dr. Shane Arnott, Chief Engineer, Anduril Industries. They discussed:

  1. The impetus for the creation of their task forces
  2. The biggest challenges and opportunities for integrating autonomy from the private sector to support the DoD
  3. What the future of autonomous systems looks like. The largest gains that their organizations hope to make with investments in autonomy
  4. Where China and/or Russia are making the largest gains with autonomous systems. What threat this presents to U.S. interests

Next Week: The Second Space Age: Great Power Competition in Space

Lessons Learned

  • Autonomy and Unmanned Systems are critical technologies that will impact all aspects of the instruments of DIME-FIL national power
    • While advanced work in autonomy is happening in the DoD ecosystem, commercial companies and universities still lead
    • China and Russia have made autonomy and unmanned systems national priorities
    • Other countries, e.g. Turkey and Israel, have proliferated systems that have been used to win a war
  • The Navy is actively looking to build and integrate unmanned/autonomous systems as part of the fleet


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Technology, Innovation, and Great Power Competition – Class 5 – AI and Machine Learning

Posted on November 9, 2021 by steve blank

This article first appeared in West Point’s Modern War Institute.

We just completed the fifth week of our new national security class at Stanford – Technology, Innovation and Great Power Competition. Joe Felter, Raj Shah and I designed the class to cover how technology will shape all the elements of national power (America’s influence and footprint on the world stage).

In class 1, we learned that national power is the combination of a country’s diplomacy, information/intelligence, its military capabilities, economic strength, finance, intelligence, and law enforcement. This “whole of government approach” is known by the acronym DIME-FIL.

Class 2 focused on China, the U.S.’s primary  great power competitor. China is using all elements of national power: diplomacy (soft power, alliances, coercion), information/ intelligence, its military might and economic strength (Belt and Road Initiative) as well as exploiting Western finance and technology. China’s goal is to challenge and overturn the U.S.-led liberal international order and replace it with a neo-totalitarian model.

The third class focused on Russia, which since 2014 has asserted itself as a competing great power. We learned how Russia pursues security and economic interests in parallel with its ideological aims. At times, these objectives complement each other. At other times they clash, as Russian policy is run by Vladimir Putin and his political institutions.

The fourth class shifted our focus to the impact commercial technologies have on DIME-FIL. The first technology we examined were semiconductors, the oil of the 21st century. The U.S. is dependent on TSMC, located in Taiwan, for its most advanced logic chips. This is problematic as China claims Taiwan is a province of China.

Today’s class: Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning

Catch up with the class by reading our intro to the class, and summaries of Classes 1, 2, 3 and 4

 

Required Readings

Introduction to AI

The AI Arms Race: Fact or Fiction?

China’s AI Strategy

Russian AI Strategy

US AI Strategy

Obama Administration

Trump Administration

Biden Administration

Other AI and National Security Resources

Reading Assignment Questions:

Pick one of the below questions and answer in approximately 100 words, based on the required readings. Please note that this assignment will be graded and count towards course participation.

  1. How would you characterize the geopolitical AI Arms Race? Is an “arms race” the right lens through which to understand this phenomenon, or is there another way to better understand great power competition in the AI domain?
  2. Can the U.S. learn any lessons from China’s AI strategy?

Class 5 – Guest Speakers

Our speakers for our fifth class were Mike Brown, Nand Mulchandani and Jacqueline Tame.

Mike Brown is the director of the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) – a Department of Defense organization that contracts with commercial companies to solve national security problems. Previously Mike was the CEO of Symantec and Quantum.

Nand Mulchandani is the Chief Technology Officer of the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC). The JAIC is the focal point of the Department of Defense AI strategy.

Jacqueline Tame was the former Acting Deputy Director of the JAIC and the architect of the JAIC “Gamechanger,” an AI-driven Policy Analysis Tool.

Mike Brown led off the session with an overview of the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU).

If you can’t see Mike Brown’s Defense Innovation Unit presentation click here.

Key takeaways from Mike’s talk were that 1) 50 years ago defense-related R&D made up 36% of global R&D. Today, defense-related R&D is 4%. Key technologies needed by defense today are made by commercial companies (5G, AI, biotech, quantum, access to space, batteries, etc.) 2) The top tech companies (Facebook, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple) outspend U.S. prime contractors 11 to 1 in R&D ($70.5B versus $6.2B.)

DIU’s role is to find and then funnel commercial technology into the DoD by prototyping, transitioning, and scaling solutions. They have (by DoD standards) an extremely fast pipeline from problem curation, to evaluating and selecting companies, then prototyping projects and inserting them into DoD programs. AI/MLis one of the six core areas DIU focuses on (along with space, autonomy, advanced energy and materials, cyber and human systems.) DIU AI/ML has three lines of effort: machine Learning predictions, big data analysis, enhanced decision making.

Nand Mulchandani described the role and the initiatives of the JAIC. One in particular, Gamechanger, was conceived and run by Jacqueline Tame.

Gamechanger uses AI to tackle a problem only a government could create. The DoD and federal regulations have 10’s of thousands of policies, laws, regulations that tell decision-makers what they can or cannot do. These exist in different places on different networks and change almost daily. Now you could simply type a natural language query that asks, “Do I have the authority do x?” Or, “How can purchase this item quickly?” etc.

Lecture 5

If you can’t see the slides, click here

Our first discussion in class (Slide 7) was whether Nicholas Chaillan’s (the first Air Force Chief Software Officer) claim that we have already lost the AI battle to China was correct.

Slides 9-14 kicked off the discussion of the geopolitical implications of AI. Given both China and Russia have made a AI a national effort, how will AI impact all aspects of DIME (Diplomatic, Intelligence, Military, and Economic) and national power? What are the impacts of AI created deep fakes? AI automating image recognition of satellite data? AI creating optimal concepts of operations? AI-tuned cyber-attacks? AI cyber security? AI smart/predicative maintenance? etc.  Where will we first see its impacts? What will our response be?

Class Discussion Questions: (Slide 15)

  • How would you characterize the strengths and weaknesses of the U.S.’s AI Strategy?
  • How would you advise the Biden Administration to pursue an AI Strategy?

Next week: Autonomy and Unmanned Systems

Lessons Learned

  • AI and machine learning is a critical technology that will impact all aspects of DIME (Diplomatic, Intelligence, Military, and Economic) and national power
  • Most of the advanced work in AI/ML is happening in commercial companies and universities not the DoD
    • China and Russia have made AI and machine learning national priorities
  • The Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) exists to find and then funnel commercial technology like AI/ML into the DoD
  • The Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC) is the focal point of the Department of Defense AI strategy


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