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In an era when America’s chief rival, China, has ordered that all commercial firms within its borders make their research and technology available for military exploitation, strengthening the relationship between Washington and Silicon Valley is an urgent necessity.
Raj Shah offers an inside look at an elite unit within the Pentagon—the Defense Innovation Unit, also known as Unit X—whose mission is to bring Silicon Valley’s cutting-edge technology to America’s military. Until recently, the Pentagon was known for its uncomfortable relationship with Silicon Valley and for slow-moving processes that acted as a brake on innovation. Unit X was specifically designed as a bridge to Valley technologists that would accelerate bringing state of the art software and hardware to the battle space. Given authority to cut through red tape and function almost as a venture capital firm, Shah and others in the Unit were tasked with meeting immediate military needs with technology from Valley startups rather than from so-called “primes”—behemoth companies like Lockheed, Raytheon, and Boeing.
A new wave of technology—AI, cyber, and low-cost hardware—is transforming how war is fought. Shah’s book shines a light on this new wave, the groundbreaking work that DIU has pioneered to advance it in the U.S. military, and what more we can all do to make the wheel of innovation spin faster.
About the Speaker:
Raj Shah is the co-founder and Managing Partner of Shield Capital, a venture capital firm focused on technologies at the convergence of commercial and defense markets. He is also the chairman of Resilience, a cybersecurity start-up he co-founded.
Raj served as the Director of the Defense Innovation Unit Experimental (DIUx), reporting to the Secretary of Defense. Raj recently co-authored the book, Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley are Transforming the Future of War, which describes DIUx’s efforts to modernize the U.S. military and bridge cultural divides between the technology ecosystem and the Pentagon.
Raj currently serves on the Board of Directors of the NATO Innovation Fund. He continues his reserve uniformed service as an F-16 pilot in the Air National Guard and is assigned as the Director of the Joint Reserve Detachment at DIU (DIU-JRD). He holds an AB from Princeton University and an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.