YouSaid · the spoken record

Emil Michael

lines on the record: 50
first: 2026-01-15
most recent: 2026-01-15
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“So that's been a dramatic change. And I didn't, you know, I guess I did realize that part of why I took this job is that I saw that change and I wanted to be part of sort of the solution there. But I think what surprised me is that the recognition, broadly speaking, that this near peer adversary had been doing so much and so little time in a concentrated way didn't really hit me until I got in and started sort of getting really understanding what had happened to some of our markets. Like again, the Germanian example, the fiberglass example, the Brussels Voters example, importance of Taiwan, these things, when you're in the outside, you understand them theoretically, but now I understand them viscerally.”
2026-01-15 · No Priors · AI and the Future of Warfare with US Under Secretary of War Emil Michael · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So I was a White House fellow called a glorified intern in 2009 to 2010. And we're in the middle of the global war on terror. And so what we're fighting at that time was a bunch of insurgents who had sort of crude weapons like improvised explosive devices and so on. Now we have a near peer adversary that has space capabilities, you know, long range strike capabilities, drones, AI. So the battlefield has shifted so dramatically toward being tech superior than it was back then. Back then, it was more like we had the superior tech, but then we were just vulnerable by adversaries who had nothing to lose that suicide. I mean, it was a totally different kind of adversaries.”
2026-01-15 · No Priors · AI and the Future of Warfare with US Under Secretary of War Emil Michael · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the DIU for defensive issue has like four or five categories of things that they look at. So that's sort of a published and public thing. The Office of Strategic Capital is a little more proactive. They're going to say we have this whole, I'm going to go find companies that already exist that do this. So it's not for startups because it's a lending facility, if you will. So they're looking for companies that already exist. And how do I expand their production? But it's a good point. At some point, I was talking to the secretary about this the other day. It's like, we should have some forum for. We're talking about the things that we need more proactively. So investors and entrepreneurs can think about them.”
2026-01-15 · No Priors · AI and the Future of Warfare with US Under Secretary of War Emil Michael · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's right. I mean, you know, fiber optic cable. We don't make fiber optic cables in this country. Fiber optic, the basic fiber, which they're using in the Ukraine-Russia war to do drones because they're jamming and all that, and we use for telecom and all that. So, yeah, it's creating that list, communicating it broadly. Trying to ensure the market conditions are such that we're not subject to the dumping sort of practices that could really kill an industry very early on. So it's a complex set of things, which is why research and engineering organization would have a strategic capital arm. That's why those two things go together, which is not apparent from the outside, is because both things go together a bit.”
2026-01-15 · No Priors · AI and the Future of Warfare with US Under Secretary of War Emil Michael · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Dependent on China for Brussels Motors. So what kind of semiconductors besides TSMC go into sort of a data center? What are the other things we have to make sure we domesticate? And how do I ensure that I'm taking the companies that exist and making sure they have the capacity to serve the whole nation's needs? And that's pretty exciting too, because that's another way of getting at the supply chain fragility and our adversary dependency. So you kind of can solve potentially both we used to have a very robust defense industrial base and industrial base period. And now you're down in some cases one supplier of a nozzle that goes in 20 different systems. And I want that one nozzle maker to succeed, but I also maybe want two or three so that we're innovating while we're doing that. And that's part of the mission of the official capital.”
2026-01-15 · No Priors · AI and the Future of Warfare with US Under Secretary of War Emil Michael · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so those are targeted at what part of the defense industrial base has a brittle supply chain where the technology exists. There's actually probably a company that actually does it here, but we need them to produce 10 times more than they're producing now. And so we've identified, we went through like exhaustively these supply chains or what are the things that go.”
2026-01-15 · No Priors · AI and the Future of Warfare with US Under Secretary of War Emil Michael · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And some people could debate the tariffs, but some of the tariff notion is to balance that dumping capability. So if you could, in theory, have a free market price for something, well, if we can't control one side of it, we have at least some levers on the other side of it to try to create some balance.”
2026-01-15 · No Priors · AI and the Future of Warfare with US Under Secretary of War Emil Michael · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's a great point, Elot, because if it was a true free market, it wouldn't be, it wouldn't have disrupted it, but there was a lot of dumping going on in certain areas to crush the other industries. I'm somewhat familiar with this from the Uber Lyft days, but there was a lot of how do you inject capital in a certain way that gives you an unfair advantage”
2026-01-15 · No Priors · AI and the Future of Warfare with US Under Secretary of War Emil Michael · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can't find enough. And it's a job to pay more than six figures in areas that are not high cost to live in. So it's like, how do you point people at the right capital, trade, do the right training, and so on? So I think there's a lot of opportunity for all categories of workers. But yes, you're right. In some cases, you know, on farms, or you're going to have robots pick strawberry, are you going to use robots in automation to figure fill holes that we can't otherwise fill? Like, yes, and we're best positioned to do it.”
2026-01-15 · No Priors · AI and the Future of Warfare with US Under Secretary of War Emil Michael · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But the one thing I would add there is like who's going to dig and weld and electrofile the data centers we're building. There's going to be people to a large degree. There'll be robots doing some of this, but there'll be people and who's going to build all the new housing we need in these cities because of the housing shortage, you know, so there's going to be work. It may not be an auto plant to the degree we had workers in an auto plan as a percentage of sort of the workforce, but there's going to be other big jobs. I mean, the welding's jobs were trying to build ships here.”
2026-01-15 · No Priors · AI and the Future of Warfare with US Under Secretary of War Emil Michael · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is again widespread. And I tribute it to President Trump. I attribute it to Secretary Hegseth. I attribute it to just smart people looking at the playing field and saying, ah, we have to be proficient in some of these things and we have to do it ourselves. You know, there's 200 pharmaceuticals on the critical shortage list because we're dependent on other countries. So that's not a viable thing. We don't want that for our children, right? So whatever it takes, we have to do it. And I'm relying on folks like you and the people you invest in to help on that. And I think we're going to, we just have to create the market conditions where it's viable.”
2026-01-15 · No Priors · AI and the Future of Warfare with US Under Secretary of War Emil Michael · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All of it, all of our nuclear power plant building capabilities, so that if there's a scenario where the adversary has control of those things, you don't have control of your own destiny, you would say that, well, it's worth the cost to bring it back and bring it back is not a snap your fingers thing, but with American ingenuity and entrepreneurship and capital markets, I think we can do it and we have to do it and we are doing it and will do it. So you pick a little bit of a Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Like what are the most important things we have to give back? Well, this deal with China says that in a year we have to the critical minerals export control thing if assuming that stays there. So we're like operating like we have to be self-sufficient in a year. And then you go down the list of things and you try to tackle them. And the good news is the enthusiasm about doing it.”
2026-01-15 · No Priors · AI and the Future of Warfare with US Under Secretary of War Emil Michael · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I think in some cases it's a matter of national survival, right? Insofar as like I'm as free market a person as anyone. But I think if you look back on the last 20 years and say, should we have outsourced all our pharmaceuticals, all our critical minerals, all our semiconductors?”
2026-01-15 · No Priors · AI and the Future of Warfare with US Under Secretary of War Emil Michael · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A lot of really good motivation from people. And if I could just get some tools in their hands and talk to them and give them some leadership and some Yusuf, it's surprising how receptive you'd find even in this large department.”
2026-01-15 · No Priors · AI and the Future of Warfare with US Under Secretary of War Emil Michael · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As fast It's, you know, it tends to work. Does it work as fast as in private industry? No, but it still works. There's still human desire to do better in every case. And I do think bureaucrats get a bad rap where bureaucracies get deserve the bad rap, right? It's the collection of rules, regulations, people, culture that end up being hard to change. Whereas any one individual person, they want to thrive, especially if you're a department of war. You don't come in department of war if you're not mission-oriented. You don't have sort of an ethic that something you're working for something bigger than yourself. You're certainly not coming here sort of to make a buck, right? You're coming here because you care about the outcome. And that gives.”
2026-01-15 · No Priors · AI and the Future of Warfare with US Under Secretary of War Emil Michael · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I try not to think through it so hard so that I'm like, oh my gosh, it's going to be too hard to do. Sort of the, again, the Uber Ounchroom mentality, it's like, let's move and see how far we can get things into the enterprise until someone says stop. So it's a different way of thinking about it. Just make it for make.”
2026-01-15 · No Priors · AI and the Future of Warfare with US Under Secretary of War Emil Michael · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I feel like we're generally okay with the investment. I mean, there's so much money going in there that that's like a well funded area, both the foundation models and the derivatives that are trying to do specific apps on those models. So that's some direction for folks.”
2026-01-15 · No Priors · AI and the Future of Warfare with US Under Secretary of War Emil Michael · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, this hypersonic weapons thing is kind of a big deal. There is a startup or a very small number of startups that are innovating here, but former SpaceX people who are running around who understand the physics of that kind of thing. So I wish there were more. I think there's going to be, when you think about drones, not just the small drones, they just get the bigger and bigger drones that really look like long-range missiles, if you will, to be an innovation there. There's innovation in the technology that goes into a drone that seeks things in a GPS-denied environment, you know, makes them more precise for Golden Dome, which you've heard about. We're looking about how to take things out from space, which is a compelling, really complex, but interesting proposition. So those are kind of some areas. And then from an AI standpoint,”
2026-01-15 · No Priors · AI and the Future of Warfare with US Under Secretary of War Emil Michael · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Equity capital has a lot of value here too. When you see promising companies and we see promising companies, you're going to say, oh, this is a promising company. They've got their DIU deal. I'm happy to fund them now and to help solve it too.”
2026-01-15 · No Priors · AI and the Future of Warfare with US Under Secretary of War Emil Michael · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To be very minimal if it exists at all. And then, by the way, helps that you guys are investing in defense tech also, you and your peers, because”
2026-01-15 · No Priors · AI and the Future of Warfare with US Under Secretary of War Emil Michael · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Capital often, and it's low cost loans, right? It's treasury, it's plus 100 bips. And in the last, I don't know, four or five months, we've done five critical minerals deals like really fast because that's a target area. And we'll have other target areas. So if you're a company that's in one of the super critical areas, we have this huge lending authority there too. So I'm trying to collapse the value of death by crowding capital around in different parts of the capital cycle. And then also we're reserving a bit of the budget every year so that we can make in-year budget decisions because the real problem is that Congress doesn't pass funding bills until halfway into the next year for the year of execution. And so if you're not planning a year and a half ahead, you're going to miss. So all these funding cycle mechanisms are a way to get at that value of death. And I think we've got, we're really close sort of pinching that into.”
2026-01-15 · No Priors · AI and the Future of Warfare with US Under Secretary of War Emil Michael · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's been a problem, such a problem that they've given an awful name to it called The Valley of Death, which everyone you'll hear AWS is Sunday here. And the ways we've come at it and I've come at it is we have this defense innovation unit, which is rapid contracting has a billion dollars, has like a reasonable amount of money to do things really fast to get startups off the ground and get them through. We have several other programs that have that same capability. One's called AFIT that takes companies that have developed a product but now need to scale their manufacturing. So there's a different line in the different point in the process. I have the Office of Strategic Capital, which has $200 billion in lending authority, low-cost loans, and it both sends a demand signal to these companies that other private capital crowds around it.”
2026-01-15 · No Priors · AI and the Future of Warfare with US Under Secretary of War Emil Michael · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hey, if you come with a tech pitch and a prototype, that's great. What's the plan to get me 10,000 of these, right? And so that's sort of the advice I give to the community.”
2026-01-15 · No Priors · AI and the Future of Warfare with US Under Secretary of War Emil Michael · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Your example of like the easy stuff. So Yeah, okay. Fair enough. Fair enough. So, yes, I consider that was easy, at least in my day. And then another thing is when you're selling a combined hardware software product, you also have to manufacture it. And that's not something that goes back to the hardware is hard in Silicon Valley. Well, hardware is hard also in the defense industry. And so producing things at scale that are flawless means you have to have a different type of capability. Elon's mastered it with satellites and all that, but there's not a lot of startups that have mastered it. So mastering the production, the scale manufacturing piece of it is the thing that startups who are selling the defense department have to also prove higher for, demonstrate competence in, and so on. And that's the one thing I'm learning in my first eight months here is that's the piece that I'm encouraging them.”
2026-01-15 · No Priors · AI and the Future of Warfare with US Under Secretary of War Emil Michael · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because people are not going to fight you. We're now excited about lower cost, faster, more technically sophisticated options. The caution I give entrepreneurs is it's still not like selling to another business. So don't have illusions that this is sort of a deal with Uber deal with MX or something. This is still government. And we have to make sure stuff works because lives are at stake, right? This is not just the money game.”
2026-01-15 · No Priors · AI and the Future of Warfare with US Under Secretary of War Emil Michael · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Would say that so a few things so number one we're more open for business than ever before because there's a recognition that our adversaries who started from a cleaner sheet of paper in the last 10-15 years, like the buildup, the military buildup in China is the biggest military buildup in world history. And so there's a real urgency on our side to ensure that we are ahead, but we stay ahead. And that's going to take a different level of investment and different type of thinking than we've had in the last 20 years. In the 80s, there were 50 defense contractors, and they got merged, so there were only about five. So there's a lot of room for new entrants. And it's crazy to me that SpaceX and Palantir all had to sue the Department of Ore for their first contract. So the idea is you don't have to sue anymore. Come through the front door.”
2026-01-15 · No Priors · AI and the Future of Warfare with US Under Secretary of War Emil Michael · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About how to solve the problem, and there's novel concepts out there. So it's a different. So the primes will excel at filling out a 300-page questionnaire. A startup won't. So, if you change it into here's the problem I'm trying to solve, I'll start up and say, Oh, I have ways of solving this. So that arsenal freedom towards about giving them permission and promoting and making sure they understand that we're serious about the fitness and the expansion and health of defense industrial base. So that's the arsenal freedom tour. So it's been a lot of fun. We've been, gosh, six days on the road in the last two weeks and visited about 20 companies. And it's been awesome. Both the workers and the tech together, these combined hardware software systems, it's really been inspiring to see the motivation in southern California and Texas and North Carolina and a lot of the places we've gone.”
2026-01-15 · No Priors · AI and the Future of Warfare with US Under Secretary of War Emil Michael · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Environment, what we've done in Iran, what we've done in Venezuela, what we've done with the Houthis, like just in one year, right? Not to mention what might come in the years ahead. You think about, were we postured for that with the defense industrial base? And the answer was we weren't as postured as we wanted to be. So he said, okay, my next fitness standard is to go to industry and tell them that we want them and need them to produce. We have their backs. We're going to bring all the resources to bear. We're going to cut out the bureaucracy. We're going to make it an open, wide front door for new entrants to come in to help us solve problems. We're going to change the way we buy, the way we do our FPs even. For an RFP, it used to be, here's a 300-page requirement document. Please fill it out and we'll decide if you win or loss. Now we say, well, here's our problem. We're trying to achieve this. Why don't you come back to us with a solution and you allow them to come in with different ideas?”
2026-01-15 · No Priors · AI and the Future of Warfare with US Under Secretary of War Emil Michael · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's been amazing, and I'll tell you why. So the Secretary's first reform or transformation, if you want to call it, was restoring the warrior ethos. It was bringing objective gender-neutral, race-neutral standards to military service members. These are fighting units. This isn't ping-pong. This is, you know, this is war fighters have to be capable to do certain things. And he was intent on restoring those things. So that's sort of a fitness standard, if you want to think about it that way. Like, what does a fitness mean for our military? And then there's the fitness of the industrial base. And what you give the warfighter to execute what tasks they're given, that's weapons, that's defense systems, it's cyber effects and so on. We noted in this conversation, defense industrial base sort of wasn't ready to provide what's necessary for the threat environment. And if you think about threat,”
2026-01-15 · No Priors · AI and the Future of Warfare with US Under Secretary of War Emil Michael · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we're going to sort of try to make that a badge of honor so that you go back into industry with some additional credibility and be proud of your service here. So those are the ways I'm attracting talent. And I'm dialing for dollars. I call everyone who's just left a job and I'm like, hey, you have a year to spare doing the coolest stuff you could possibly imagine recruiting Tuesday, as I call them. And I call my friends. Like, you guys and said, do you have anyone who's on the bench right now? And we have so much interesting stuff to do that I'm picking a few people off every month.”
2026-01-15 · No Priors · AI and the Future of Warfare with US Under Secretary of War Emil Michael · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the big untold stories about Doge, which is, yeah, did some aggressive actions in the beginning that were controversial and all that. But the talent they brought into every department could then be deployed on other projects like the AI action plan that we did with Gen AI. So because they were already like Elon chose technically sophisticated people, they weren't all engineers, some were lawyers, some were, but they all had a mentality of a fixer, builder mentality. So I borrowed a lot of those people. And then they attract more people on the way in. And then we have this US tech force that Scott Kapoor from Ann Recent Horowitz is deployed. And we were hoping to get thousands of people out of college for a two-year stint, sort of make it, you know, this is your service to the country as a technologist rather than as a soldier. So now we want both.”
2026-01-15 · No Priors · AI and the Future of Warfare with US Under Secretary of War Emil Michael · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You guys are immersed in that because you're living in the frontier of AI use cases in the enterprise. We're just starting over here in DC. So I think people are going to go, holy cow, you don't have to write 20-page PowerPoints, 100-page congressional reports, you know, in the same way that you did with all the manpower you did. And that'll be more exciting for people to work at too, right? It's because you're not doing as much drudgery. So you'll attract better talent as a result. So I think those are two clear areas the next few years you'll see a lot of advancement.”
2026-01-15 · No Priors · AI and the Future of Warfare with US Under Secretary of War Emil Michael · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I think that autonomous systems is the clearest thing because we're already thinking about that with drones. And then now you take that to other things like surroundics building or analyze building or whatever. And you apply AI to them and more sophisticated AI over time that could do sensing and change how it behaves. Those are absolutely going to be the things that happen in the next few years that AI will have a dramatic impact on, which is why Boston Dynamics didn't make as much progress as optimists did and the AI, you know, the things that started later on robotics just work better because they were more AI infused. So I think we're actually in a good moment for Department of War to start taking advantage of those things. And that's where we see some big improvements. And then the enterprise piece, people, you know, you're like, it's sort of boring for Silicon Valley Valley people. You're like, okay, of course.”
2026-01-15 · No Priors · AI and the Future of Warfare with US Under Secretary of War Emil Michael · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Holy cow, you realize this is what AI could do. So we picked them purposefully so that they could be both demonstrations or pathfinders, we call them in our bureaucraties and across these dimensions. So we hit all parts of the Department of War and we think that's a way to get people thinking about AI for every use case possible and then deciding not to when only when it's like clearly not useful.”
2026-01-15 · No Priors · AI and the Future of Warfare with US Under Secretary of War Emil Michael · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can aggregate from all these sources, the more intelligence we can use, which is a great deterrent because we have the best intelligence collection in the world. And then third, for warfighting. So war fighting is a complex sort of thing. You're doing war gaming. You're doing planning. You know, there's a lot of formalities in how you execute orders, how you simulate what might happen if you do different scenarios. So across those three areas, enterprise intelligence, wargaming, we'll have a few pace setting projects within each of them, which are designed to sort of both break down barriers to make sure we get their data in the system, but to show”
2026-01-15 · No Priors · AI and the Future of Warfare with US Under Secretary of War Emil Michael · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So instead of white papers and theories and committees, we said, okay, how are we going to deploy AI? So we simplified it and say, well, there's three sort of broad categories we're going to deploy it on. One is enterprise use cases. Like any company would use it for efficiencies, right? The second is intelligence. We get a lot of intelligence from satellites, from all the things the United States does across the enterprise. previously used human analysts for. And so if you could improve the leverage of the human analyst by teeing up to them, here's 10 things we saw that you should look at. Man, you're going to make that analyst way more efficient, right? And then, well, if I could take this type of intelligence and fuse it with this type of intelligence, I'm going to make that analyst really capable because usually one type of analyst looks at one type of intelligence. So the more data.”
2026-01-15 · No Priors · AI and the Future of Warfare with US Under Secretary of War Emil Michael · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“60 days, good, great collaboration from Gemini, from Google's Gemini, who already works at Department of Wars had some familiarity with our architecture and our systems and got that launch to three million people. And we've had over a million people unique use it in the last 30 days, which is kind of awesome. You've got one-third of the enterprise on one model that's 2.5, not 3.0. 3.0 is coming in a couple weeks. Then we're going to do Grock with XAI, and we'll see where we get to with the other two. And then we do it across classification levels. So it is going to fundamentally change the way we work here. And we were able to do it fast because we got fast people.”
2026-01-15 · No Priors · AI and the Future of Warfare with US Under Secretary of War Emil Michael · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So Jedi.mil because if you're on a Department of War network, even the unclassified networks are secure, right? And different levels of security as you go up. So you still have to figure out how to architect using AI into those networks. It's not simple as going to chatGPT.com and signing up because those things are sort of generally prohibited because you have to have restrictions on how you use them. So we had to figure out what are the policies how do you architect it in the network so nothing goes back into the pool of data that ChatGPT or Claude or any of these companies have because we certainly don't want no one in this country wants our data getting out into the general public right into these models so you have to architect different data flow so but we move really fast that had some like databricks engineers former databricks engineers former meta engineers former aws people tiger team”
2026-01-15 · No Priors · AI and the Future of Warfare with US Under Secretary of War Emil Michael · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're at the Pentagon and you're working for the Secretary of War, then your job, or my job is to, as a representative for him in the technology area, is to look across the services Army Navy, Air Force, Space Force, and say, what are the common needs, the enablers, the tech enablers, if you will, or the enablers that are useful in a broad way? If it's just useful for one service and one use case, that's probably something that service can handle on their own because they have their own labs and research and development dollars and ability to procure and so on. So I'm looking for commonalities where you get economies of scale where there's things that could be useful for all of them. And so that's why it took me a couple months to get through these 14 technology areas. So to go get a sense of what's really important to scale them down to six that have some common thread to them that could be more useful across the enterprise.”
2026-01-15 · No Priors · AI and the Future of Warfare with US Under Secretary of War Emil Michael · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Whether it's autonomous submarines, autonomous boats, autonomous sort of big drones, essentially autonomous airplanes, that mix will happen, that shift mix will happen over time. And you'll see every defense budget year over year. More and more will be allocated to those kinds of things as AI gets more prominent and being able to control these things and sense the environment around them and create autonomous action. So in 10 years, wouldn't surprise me if 20, 30 percent of the budget is spent on those kinds of systems, which are also cheaper. So for 20, 20, 30 percent of the budget, you get way more firepower than you would for the other systems that are not designed to be for that case without human syndrome, with human syndrome.”
2026-01-15 · No Priors · AI and the Future of Warfare with US Under Secretary of War Emil Michael · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think that starting with the Russia Ukraine war, you've got this sort of renaissance in drones or robots, think about it as robots as the new frontline, right? In a territorial battle. If you're fighting over land, less costly in human life if you have robots fighting first before humans come in. Without the drone warfare in that area of the world, you part of you have seen way more human casualties. It's already devastating. It would have been way more devastating. So I think for territorial battles, you'll see that happen real fast where the shift, the shift mix toward robots or drones will happen much faster. When you talk about carriers and sea, there's still projection of power. There's still protecting sea lanes. There's still all those things which will continue for some time. But the mix shift is still also going to move to autonomous.”
2026-01-15 · No Priors · AI and the Future of Warfare with US Under Secretary of War Emil Michael · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Technology area is to do that at scale and at a reasonable price because they're all very expensive now. They're exquisite. So how do you make them in the way Andrew thinks about them much more produce much cheaper, more mass. So I call the scaled hypersonics. Another one is scaled directed energy. So directed energy is high powered microwave or lasers to take down missiles like iron beam if you think about what the Israelis did. And now with all the drone warfare you see, it's much cheaper to take out drones with an energy zap than it is to send a missile at another at a drone, right? A $5 million missile at a $50,000 drone or something. So directed energy, again, is the technology exists, but how I do that at scale.”
2026-01-15 · No Priors · AI and the Future of Warfare with US Under Secretary of War Emil Michael · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, off the top of my head, the number one is applied AI because we're not building a foundation model at the DOW because there's being hundreds of billions of dollars being spent by the private sector on this. So how do I adapt or use what's being developed in the private sector and apply it to the Department of War use cases? So that's number one. Number two is, I don't know if you've heard of hypersonic missiles, but they're sort of the newest variation of we used to have nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles now these hypersonics. Elon talks about this all the time that could go five times the speed of sound, the minimum Mach five. And so they pose somewhat of a unique threat and they're maneuverable. And so they're, you know, it's the new sort of threat environment weapon that's entered the picture. Few countries can build them. The Chinese, Russia, US. But my”
2026-01-15 · No Priors · AI and the Future of Warfare with US Under Secretary of War Emil Michael · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, so just to analogize to Uber or any company that we've worked on together, imagining you went to a management team and you're like, how many product, you know, how's your product line going? You're a series B company. You're like, well, I've got 14 product lines. You'd say, well, wait a minute. Sort of uninvestable, right? So when I got here, there were 14 critical technology areas. So critical, critical to national security. So I looked at them. I said, well, number one, if there's that many that can't be critical. But number two, hard for people to hold in their head that many priorities and wake up every morning knowing that they have to get up and execute against those priorities and make progress because you get distracted you get too much disparate separation and therefore not enough resource to any one thing so i cut them down to six after studying and i made it more action oriented so we put sprints behind them like you would in the engineering team”
2026-01-15 · No Priors · AI and the Future of Warfare with US Under Secretary of War Emil Michael · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Teams at DOW and across the government. And yeah, it's harder, but in some ways it's more impactful. So I'm just as motivated.”
2026-01-15 · No Priors · AI and the Future of Warfare with US Under Secretary of War Emil Michael · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, I mean, hopefully part of the reason I got chosen for the job and certainly the reason I took it is to inject some of that urgency speed, you know, being a little bit impervious to barriers and trying to run them over as opposed to being stopped by them. And it works leadership and organizations is not is somewhat transferable, right? If you can show that kind of urgency and leadership and create a culture in a company, you could certainly make some progress in a bureaucracy or a government agency. It might not be as fast, but I also have way more resources, right? And I have a way more, you know, in some ways important mission to humanity. So those two things are different in some ways sort of give me the same abilities to sort of drive fast. And people respond. I mean, I'm getting a lot of people who want to join my team or other.”
2026-01-15 · No Priors · AI and the Future of Warfare with US Under Secretary of War Emil Michael · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, DIUs had some good success with Saronic and a bunch of other companies. And now it's time to do more of it. So it's more of a focus. And yeah, DARPA is just, you know, invented the internet. You go to their gift shop and they have like a napkin that where someone drew out the internet sort of architecture and they sell that in the gift shop in case you guys come to DC we can get you some of those.”
2026-01-15 · No Priors · AI and the Future of Warfare with US Under Secretary of War Emil Michael · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Biggest organization with the biggest budget in the world is not a small thing to think about how to do AI right for. And then the defense innovation unit, which is actually Basin Mountain View, and it's supposedly the link between the fence industry and the startup community that's building commercial products and may have dual use. And then last is this strategic capability office, which takes kind of existing systems and tries to modify them in strategic ways or supplement them to get for strategic surprise, they call it. So all that all has technology underneath it. And the idea is to unify that across the department because we spend $150 billion a year on tech in one way or another. You want to avoid duplication. You want to bring things to market faster. So that was a big announcement yesterday by the Secretary at Starbase.”
2026-01-15 · No Priors · AI and the Future of Warfare with US Under Secretary of War Emil Michael · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So for a long time at the Department of War, there was one organization called Acquisition Technology and Logistics. It was all bunched up into one thing. And then about eight years ago, they said, well, tech is moving faster on new kinds of weaponry and defense systems than on the old system. So we're going to split out acquisition from research and engineering, they call it. So I'm the Under Secretary for Research and Engineering, which is cool, right? Because I get to work on the stuff that I used to work on where I was in Silicon Valley, like with work with entrepreneurs, work with new companies. I'm now responsible for DARPA, which is obviously super cool because it's some of the most advanced research that happens in the country, if not the world. In the last few months, I took over as Chief AI office in the Department of War, which were 3 million employees.”
2026-01-15 · No Priors · AI and the Future of Warfare with US Under Secretary of War Emil Michael · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Military buildup in China is the biggest military buildup in world history. And so there's a real urgency on our side to ensure that we are ahead, but we stay ahead. And that's going to take a different level of investment and different type of thinking than we've had in the last 20 years. In the 80s, there were 50 defense contractors, and they got merged, so there were only about five. There's a lot of room for new entrants. It's crazy to me that SpaceX and Androil and Palantir all had to sue the Department of War for their first contract. So the idea is you don't have to sue anymore. Come through the front door because no one's people are not going to fight you. We're now excited about lower cost, faster, more sophisticated options.”
2026-01-15 · No Priors · AI and the Future of Warfare with US Under Secretary of War Emil Michael · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT