YouSaid · the spoken record

Christopher Kirchhoff

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68
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2024-10-30
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2024-10-30
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  1. “Well, the human rights community has at a number of junctions tried to propose alternate pathways. And I'm very attuned to the arguments they're making, because I think they're arguments that should be listened to. And by the way, when I was a Pentagon employee through the, I think it's called the Combined Federal campaign, we could donate a portion of our salary to a number of nonprofit charities. And one of the charities I donated to was Human Rights Watch, which sort of wonderfully subversive for a Pentagon employee because they actually produce incredibly great research about what's happening on the ground in conflict areas around the world that every national security official, I think, should be reading. And out of Human Rights Watch and another community of computer scientists led in part by Stuart Russell, there is this movement called Stop Killer Robots that emerged about 10 years ago, foreseeing the shift in AI, foreseeing the shift in the rise of smart micro drones,”

    2024-10-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Christopher Kirchhoff on Military Innovation and the Future of War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “I mean, we can only hope in the laws of war that most violence in war, if we have to have an armed conflict in the first place, would be constrained to the battlefield. But as we're seeing more and more as homelands become more reachable through cyber attacks, through sabotage, through terrorism, I mean, just think about the mayhem, the DC sniper caused in this city years ago, right? One person essentially effectively shut down a city. So it's hard to imagine a large-scale conflict playing out without large elements of domestic upheaval and sabotage.”

    2024-10-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Christopher Kirchhoff on Military Innovation and the Future of War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Yeah, well, that's a thing. I mean, with neutron weapons, you're just frying electronics. So the electricity grid will probably go down in whole or in part. If you're in the center of astronomy and people ask a lot of microelectronics will stop working, this means that your computer is a brick, your car is a brick, gas station pumps are a brick. So EMPs are another weapon from the Cold War, right, that were tested in very sophisticated ways in the nineteen fifties. And thankfully have not been used by a major power.”

    2024-10-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Christopher Kirchhoff on Military Innovation and the Future of War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Russia is also trying. Russia is developing a panoply of sort of doctor evil weapons, the latest one to emerge in public is this idea of putting nuclear payload on a satellite that would effectively stop modern life as we know it by ending GPS and satellite communications. That's really somebody sitting in a Dr. Evil layer stroking their cat coming up with ideas that are game changing, but they come up, they've come up with another number of other weapons that are quite striking. super cavitating torpedoes that could take out an entire aircraft carrier group. Advanced states are now coming up with incredibly potent weapons.”

    2024-10-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Christopher Kirchhoff on Military Innovation and the Future of War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “So, what's in the media and what's been discussed quite a bit publicly is that China has more successful R&D test of hypersonic weapons. Hypersonic weapons are very difficult to make fly for long periods. They tend to self-destruct at some point during flight. And China has demonstrated a much fuller flight cycle of what looks to be an almost operational weapon.”

    2024-10-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Christopher Kirchhoff on Military Innovation and the Future of War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Well, right now they're incredibly hard to produce. So, you know, right now they're essentially in a research and development phase. The first nation that figures out how to make titanium just a little bit more heat resistant to make the guidance systems just a little bit better enables manufacturing at scale. So not just five or seven weapons that are test fired every year, but 25 or 50 or 75 or 100. That really would change the balance of power in a remarkable number of military scenarios.”

    2024-10-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Christopher Kirchhoff on Military Innovation and the Future of War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Hypersonic, right? Well, ICBMs don't have the same maneuverability. So that's one factor that makes hypersonic weapons different. A second is just speed. So with an ICBM launch, you have 20 to 25 minutes or so. This is why the rule for a presidential nuclear decision conference is you have to be able to get the president online with his national security advisors in, I think, like five or seven minutes. So the whole system is time to defeat adversary threats. The whole continuity of government system is upended by the timeline of hypersonic weapons. And oh, by the way, there's no way to defend against them. So forget the fact that they're nuclear capable if you want to take out an aircraft carrier or a service combatant or assassinate a world leader, a hypersonic weapon is a fantastic way to do it and watch them very carefully because more than anything else they will shift the balance of military power in the next five years.”

    2024-10-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Christopher Kirchhoff on Military Innovation and the Future of War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “It's a number of things, and when you add them up, they really are quite frightening. So hypersonic weapons, because of the way they maneuver, don't necessarily have to follow a ballistic trajectory, which means we have very sophisticated space-based systems that can detect the launch of a missile, particularly a nuclear missile. But right then, you're immediately calculating where it's going to go based on its ballistic trajectory. Well, hypersonic weapon can steer. It can turn left, it can turn right, it can dive up, it can dive down.”

    2024-10-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Christopher Kirchhoff on Military Innovation and the Future of War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Well, I mean, if you think about what's coming next and what 5G will enable, you have self-driving cars, right? Self-driving cars are not going to be able to get better along with a whole bunch of sort of connected devices without really fast 5G that penetrates really far. I mean, you can buy a Tesla. You know, it's great if it dries around in the city, but what if you're trying to go visit a national park out west in a place where there is very little self-connectivity? So 5G really is a national innovation emergency that we have yet to find a solution to.”

    2024-10-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Christopher Kirchhoff on Military Innovation and the Future of War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “It's a fascinating illustration of how we as a nation, as a state, have not made wise choices with our allocation of resources. And the story in a nutshell is that in the Cold War through the end of the Cold War, the military made enormous investments in a set of military systems that took up a significant part of the best 5G spectrum. So Navy radars, some other highly classified systems and covert systems. And the expense of shifting those systems away from the frequency that turns out to be best for 5G is enormous. And yet we don't have a mechanism in the government, right, that can take these sort of long-term looks at spectrum. Spectrum is an example of where we're failing strategically. And so as a result, if you go to Beijing, 5G speeds are what? 50 times faster, 100 times faster because they're in a completely different part of the 5G spectrum.”

    2024-10-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Christopher Kirchhoff on Military Innovation and the Future of War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Know to be honest, it's not outside the realm of possibility. I mean, you can ask the question today, what U.S. military installation or important government site is adequately defended against an extremely advanced, unprompted surprise drone attack? I would guess the number. That are tuned to detect drones. So now people are asking questions can you use cell phone tower transmissions and use AI algorithms to process from that and detect flying small drones that we don't expect to be there?”

    2024-10-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Christopher Kirchhoff on Military Innovation and the Future of War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “I think drones are good for anybody looking to defeat a conventional military operating in conventional ways. And I'll just list off a couple examples. So one, how was it that Hamas fighters bridged the border in Gaza, which is essentially a modern-day Maginot line with multiple lines of defenses? The key tactical maneuver they pulled off on october seventh was using quadcopters to drop small charges on the generator's powering the border tower surveillance systems. So similarly, you know, the Houthis have effectively harassed shipping now with a combination of loitering munitions, cruise missiles, and autonomous drones. And then in northern Israel, perhaps most strikingly, Hezbollah has depopulated the first ten miles of northern Israel using loitering munitions and cruise missiles, because the IDF can't effectively defend their northern border, and that has displaced eighty-five thousand Israeli”

    2024-10-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Christopher Kirchhoff on Military Innovation and the Future of War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “What's really remarkable about the Ukrainian drone ecosystem is, you know, they're not just building simple kamikaze drones. They're building surveillance drones that will automatically go fly, surveil the battlefield, return, upload images that can then be uploaded to killer drones that then go out. On top of this, you have people using open source software to build fusion systems that take sensor data from EW detection systems, feed live feed from drones, and put them all together on a controller that an operating unit going forward actually uses to mount a coordinated attack using multiple drone systems. So this is to say, in effect, Ukrainian startups have replicated the entire battle management system of the US Air Force. They have effectively AWACS drones, attack drones. It's quite remarkable what they've done with open source software and hardware that is pennies on the dollar.”

    2024-10-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Christopher Kirchhoff on Military Innovation and the Future of War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Well, some of DARPA's cyber programs and some of the IUU's work does in a month actually produce things. And you can imagine in the context of a longer conflict and ecosystem on the US side quickly developing. But the reality is that if you look at the Pentagon spend, even now two years into the Ukraine conflict, it's largely, to be honest, along historical trend lines. So that tells me the military really isn't changing even as many of the military senior leaders recognize how quickly war is changing.”

    2024-10-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Christopher Kirchhoff on Military Innovation and the Future of War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “You know, there are parts of the military that are good at, like DARPA, like Defense Invasion Union, that have a phenomenal track record.”

    2024-10-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Christopher Kirchhoff on Military Innovation and the Future of War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Well, you know, the Pentagon is trying. And a few months ago, they announced something called the replicator initiative, led by Defense Innovation Unit, which is a push to develop autonomous swarming drones for in the air and on-sea and undersea also. But an important caveat to that, this is an initiative that was announced more than a year after the start of the Ukraine war, which tells you we're playing catch-up. And because it was announced outside the budget cycle, they've had to go around and bureaucratically pull money from other programs, which is a whole extra step. And if you add up all the money that the Pentagon is spending on a replicator, it's less than, you know, a percent of the procurement spend at the Pentagon. So I think the question is, that program is directionally right, but it certainly is not right in size or scale in comparison to the changes we're seeing, not just in Ukraine, but in the Middle East and other places around the world.”

    2024-10-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Christopher Kirchhoff on Military Innovation and the Future of War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Well, I think right now a very open question. I think drones are primarily offensive dominant in the sense that there's right now almost 300 companies in Ukraine that have faster innovation cycles at this moment than all of the Western military companies fielding drones. And so if you go to the front lines today in Ukraine, I got a chance to visit there in October with my co-author, Rod Shaw, you will find predominantly Ukrainian drones operating. And the reason why is that they're literally able to go back to garage shops all over the country and overnight change the algorithm in the drone to respond to rapidly evolving Russian electronic warfare tactics that change. So that's the counter-”

    2024-10-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Christopher Kirchhoff on Military Innovation and the Future of War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “It's certainly the next generation of military technology. And we've seen this coming for a while. DIU Defense Innovation Unit, the topic of the book in 2017 started the military's first commercial drone unit and began experimenting with both offensive and defensive uses of drones. And now we see the full coming of the circle of the future that some people in the military saw then, which is that just last month in Ukraine, the US military has to ask the Ukrainians to remove from the front all 31 of the M1A1s Abrams battle tanks that we gave the Ukrainians because a quarter of them had been destroyed by Russian kamikaze drones. So not only is it the ascendancy of an era of drone warfare, but it's probably the end of man-machized warfare as well on land. And we can also talk about similarly epic changes at sea in the air and space.”

    2024-10-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Christopher Kirchhoff on Military Innovation and the Future of War · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source