The Future of Warfare: How the US Department of War Thinks About AI
Emil Michael (guest), Sarah Guo (host), Elad Gil (host)
In this episode of No Priors, featuring Emil Michael and Sarah Guo, The Future of Warfare: How the US Department of War Thinks About AI explores pentagon’s AI push: applied deployment, autonomous systems, industrial-base rebuilding strategy Emil Michael, Under Secretary for Research and Engineering (and leader of the DoW’s chief AI office), describes a restructuring meant to unify technology efforts across DARPA, DIU, and other innovation arms to move faster and reduce duplication.
Pentagon’s AI push: applied deployment, autonomous systems, industrial-base rebuilding strategy
Emil Michael, Under Secretary for Research and Engineering (and leader of the DoW’s chief AI office), describes a restructuring meant to unify technology efforts across DARPA, DIU, and other innovation arms to move faster and reduce duplication.
He argues the urgency is driven by China’s unprecedented military buildup and by U.S. supply-chain fragility, requiring new investment levels, new entrants, and faster acquisition pathways for startups.
A centerpiece is GenAI.mil: a secure, DoW-network GenAI platform deployed quickly to the enterprise, reaching ~1M unique users in 30 days, with multiple models and expansion across classification levels planned.
The conversation emphasizes a shift toward distributed autonomous systems (drones/robots), scalable production (not just prototypes), and financing mechanisms (DIU, manufacturing scale programs, and the Office of Strategic Capital) to “collapse the Valley of Death.”
Key Takeaways
The DoW is trying to act like a focused product organization, not a committee.
Michael says 14 “critical” tech areas created diffusion; he cut them to six and put “sprints” behind them to drive execution, signaling a cultural shift toward prioritization and delivery.
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Applied AI is the #1 priority because the private sector is funding the frontier.
Rather than build a DoW foundation model, the plan is to adapt commercial models to defense use cases, focusing on deployment, security constraints, and integration with DoW workflows/data.
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GenAI.mil is a template for rapid, secure AI rollout at massive scale.
Because public chatbots are generally prohibited on DoW networks, they designed a different data-flow architecture to prevent sensitive data from leaking into public model training, then shipped to millions quickly with a “tiger team.”
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Defense AI deployment is organized into three lanes: enterprise, intelligence, and warfighting.
Michael frames near-term progress as “pace-setting” pathfinder projects that both deliver value (efficiency, intel fusion, planning/wargaming) and prove feasibility to overcome internal resistance.
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Autonomy will take an increasing share of budgets because it’s cheaper per firepower and reduces risk to personnel.
He predicts a meaningful budget mix shift toward autonomous systems (air/sea/undersea) and suggests 20–30% of the defense budget could go to these systems within 10 years as AI enables sensing and independent action.
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The bottleneck for startups is scaling flawless manufacturing, not prototyping.
Michael warns founders that selling to DoW isn’t like enterprise sales; beyond a demo, they must show a credible plan to produce at scale (e. ...
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Capital mechanisms are being used to shrink the ‘Valley of Death’ between pilot and scale.
He cites DIU’s rapid contracting funds, programs aimed at manufacturing scale, and the Office of Strategic Capital’s low-cost loans (Treasuries + ~100 bps) to expand capacity in brittle supply chains (e. ...
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Notable Quotes
“Fourteen priorities mean no priorities at all.”
— Emil Michael
“We’re not building a foundation model at the DoW… 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?”
— Emil Michael
“It’s crazy to me that SpaceX, and Anduril, 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.”
— Emil Michael
“We’ve had over a million people, uniques, use it in the last thirty days.”
— Emil Michael
“If you come with a tech pitch and a prototype, that’s great. What’s the plan to get me ten thousand of these?”
— Emil Michael
Questions Answered in This Episode
GenAI.mil architecture: what specific technical controls ensure prompts/data don’t flow back into public model training, and how is auditing handled?
Emil Michael, Under Secretary for Research and Engineering (and leader of the DoW’s chief AI office), describes a restructuring meant to unify technology efforts across DARPA, DIU, and other innovation arms to move faster and reduce duplication.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
You mention “one-third of the enterprise on one model.” What criteria decide which model(s) get approved, and how do you evaluate performance vs security tradeoffs?
He argues the urgency is driven by China’s unprecedented military buildup and by U. ...
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For the three AI lanes (enterprise, intelligence, warfighting), what are the named “pace-setting” pathfinder projects and what measurable outcomes are expected in 6–12 months?
A centerpiece is GenAI. ...
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On autonomy: what are the main blockers today—policy (human-in-the-loop), reliability, comms in contested environments, or procurement—and which are you tackling first?
The conversation emphasizes a shift toward distributed autonomous systems (drones/robots), scalable production (not just prototypes), and financing mechanisms (DIU, manufacturing scale programs, and the Office of Strategic Capital) to “collapse the Valley of Death.”
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Scaled hypersonics and directed energy: what does “at scale and reasonable price” concretely mean (target unit costs, production rates, timelines)?
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Transcript Preview
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 gonna take a different level of investment and different type of thinking than we've had in the last twenty years. In the '80s, there were fifty defense contractors, and they got merged, so there are only about five. There's a lot of room for new entrants. It's crazy to me that SpaceX, and Anduril, and Palantir all had to sue the Department of War for their first contract. [chuckles] So the idea is, you don't have to sue anymore. Come through the front door, [chuckles] because no one's-- people are not gonna fight you. We're now excited about lower cost, faster, more sophisticated options.
[upbeat music] Hi, listeners. Welcome back to No Priors. We're here today with Emil Michael, the former Chief Business Officer of Uber, White House Fellow, and currently CTO of the Department of War.
Emil, thanks for joining us. Welcome to No Priors.
Good to see you guys. It's been a long time.
Congratulations on the new role, um, very exciting news. Could you describe a little bit more about what that role is and what's changed at the Department of War to sort of create this new war-- this new, um, role, this new momentum, new initiatives that you all are focused on?
Yeah. So, um, for a long time at the Department of War, there was one organization called, uh, Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics, and 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 gonna split out acquisition from research and engineering," they call it. So I'm now Under Secretary for Research and Engineering, which is cool, right? Because I get to work on the stuff that I used to work on when 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 most-- some of the most advanced research that happens in the country, if not the world. Uh, in the last few months, I took over as chief AI-- the chief AI office in the Department of War, which with three million employees, the biggest organization with the biggest budget in the world, you know, is, is not a small thing to, to think about how to do AI right for. And then, the Defense Innovation Unit, which is actually based in Mountain View-
Mm-hmm.
- and it's supposedly the l-- it's supposed to be the link between defense industry and, uh, you know, the startup community that's building commercial products and may have dual use. And then, last is the Strategic Capability Office, which takes kind of existing, um, systems and tries to modify them in strategic ways or supplement them to get, you know, 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, you know, a hundred fifty billion dollars a year on tech in one way or another. So you wanna avoid duplication, you wanna bring things to market faster. So that, that was the big announcement yesterday by, by the secretary at, uh, at Starbase.
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