Bridging the Persistent Innovation Gap
Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley Are Transforming the Future of War. Raj Shah and Christopher Kirchhoff. Simon and Schuster. 336 pages. $30
By Maj. Gen. John Ferrari, U.S. Army retired
Defense contractors are incentivized “to build what Congress budgeted rather than what warfighters really [need] to win.” So goes the main thesis of the book written by Raj Shah and Christopher Kirchhoff. In Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley Are Transforming the Future of War, they set off on a quest to solve the puzzle of why America, which is driving the global commercial technological revolution, had allowed its military to fall dangerously behind in technology, to the point that many fear an outright loss to China in a war.
Their quest begins in Qatar, in U.S. Air Forces Central’s Combined Air Operations Center (CAOC), which by 2016 had such obsolete software and technology that its personnel were forced to plan air refueling missions by hand. There was a program to modernize the CAOC, but it was led by a traditional defense prime contractor. The project was years behind, and the price was approaching $750 billion.
The authors came in with a new Silicon Valley team that developed a $1.5 million app to solve the most intractable problem. Their approach gave birth to an internal DoD software startup-like organization called Kessel Run, which overhauled the entire CAOC for a fraction of the cost. This opportunity was the proving ground for the Defense Innovation Unit Experimental, also known as Unit X. Formed in California, this contracting unit was designed to bridge the gap between the Pentagon and the startup community.
Shah and Kirchoff have written an informative, irreverent and sometimes humorous account of trying to bridge that gap. The first half of the book depicts their time inside DoD bureaucracy with the innovation unit, serving as a primer on how the Pentagon works—and how the bureaucracy stifles innovation. The second half depicts their time outside the Pentagon, from starting a defense-oriented venture capital fund to aiding the Ukrainian army in its war against Russia. This section shows how small companies innovate—and how they can aid American warfighters.
Unit X brings the reader along in a novel-like format, with real-life protagonists and antagonists, suspense about what happens next and lessons on what can be done to fix the system. The authors demonstrate with vivid stories that both sides share the blame for keeping critical new technologies out of the hands of warfighters.
They pull no punches about the tech industry’s lack of military awareness and the reluctance of many of its workers to do business with the Pentagon. However, they point out that Silicon Valley has made a cultural and financial pivot since 2016 but too often runs into obstacles.
Many within the defense bureaucracy are still hesitant to admit that there is a problem with the current system, such as when Pentagon acquisition chief Bill LaPlante states, “We’re not fighting in Ukraine with Silicon Valley right now, even though they’re going to try to take credit for it.” Indeed, SpaceX, Anduril Industries, Palantir Technologies, Capella Space and many other defense startups have transformed the war by making communications, data and unmanned vehicles ubiquitous in record time.
With war raging in Ukraine and Israel, and tensions rising over Taiwan, the U.S. military no longer has the luxury of unlimited time or money to prepare. The key lesson is that those who are most fervent about helping our warfighters must not lay down arms out of frustration, but instead engage in the bureaucratic knife fight that Shah and Kirchhoff have been and are still engaged in. Unit X, if nothing else, will give hope and courage to all that change is possible.
Maj. Gen. John Ferrari, U.S. Army retired, is a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Washington, D.C. He served for 32 years in the Army, including deployments to Iraq, Afghanistan and during Operation Desert Storm.
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Meeting America’s Bravest of the Brave
Beyond the Call of Duty: The Life of Colonel Robert Howard, America’s Most Decorated Green Beret. Stephen Moore. Dutton Caliber. 304 pages. $14.99
By Robert Seals
The Military Assistance Command, Vietnam-Studies and Observations Group blazed a trail for the U.S. military’s special operations forces. Teams conducted incredibly hazardous missions into enemy territory from 1964 to 1972. “Pursued by human trackers and even bloodhounds, these small teams out-maneuvered, out-fought and out-ran their numerically superior foe,” the group’s 2001 Presidential Unit Citation says. Yet, these special operators “never wavered,” the citation says.
Stephen Moore, in his book Beyond the Call of Duty: The Life of Colonel Robert Howard, America’s Most Decorated Green Beret, singles out Robert Howard for praise. Moore believes that Howard’s heroism in Vietnam “[ranks] him in the same class as ... World War II’s Audie Murphy and World War I’s Alvin York,” he writes. Also, he believes Howard’s medals make him “the most highly decorated Green Beret.”
Born in 1939, Howard’s poor farm family existed with little in Alabama. Luxuries were rare. But “Granny Callie” was one of the “few positive role models” for Howard, Moore writes. After she caught a preteen Robert running home from bullies, she said, “If you’re going to run, you best run towards your problems, not away!”
Howard left school early, enlisted in the U.S. Army a week after his 17th birthday and became a paratrooper. He jumped out of the first airplane he was ever on, and in 1965, he deployed with the 101st Airborne Division to Vietnam. There, he displayed his trademark aggressiveness and received his first combat wound.
While hospitalized, Howard befriended a 5th Special Forces Group soldier and subsequently volunteered for Special Forces. After completing the Special Forces Qualification Course, he was back in Vietnam by 1967 and in the Studies and Observations Group’s Command and Control Central. A “soldier’s soldier,” he always volunteered when a recon team or “Hatchet Force” needed a man and “ran toward the enemy at all times,” Moore writes.
Missions, medals and wounds followed, with his first Medal of Honor recommendation in November 1967 “for his selfless assaults against [North Vietnamese Army] machine-gun nests” while under heavy enemy fire, according to a biography by the U.S. Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School.
After another hospitalization, Howard was back at Command and Control Central by October 1968. On his third tour, he was highly valued as “a one-man Army,” Moore writes. After a Laos mission, he was recommended again for the Medal of Honor for leading a company for five days while wounded and returning with a valuable prisoner.
Recovering, Howard was soon back. During another mission, wounded and in great pain, he saved his platoon from intense attacks and defeated one assault with a pistol.
For amazing “leadership, determination, and devotion to duty,” as one of his fellow Green Berets testified to intelligence officers, Howard was recommended a third time, with the Medal of Honor finally approved and awarded in 1971.
Beyond the Call of Duty is written in a you-are-there manner, with 17 short chapters, some only six pages long. The work’s strength is in the descriptions of Howard’s Vietnam experiences. The book is well researched, with 82 bibliography entries, and the glossary and abbreviations will help those unfamiliar. Phrases such as the “automatic rifle barked angrily” are sensationalist, but Moore has written a page-turning biography rather than an academic work.
Howard remains a legendary figure in Army Special Forces, and Beyond the Call of Duty vividly describes why. Howard wanted to be where he was most valuable, and during the Vietnam War, that was with the Studies and Observations Group. At the pinnacle of a supremely dangerous profession, he was the right man at the right time, and he paid the price, as witnessed by eight ultimate awards of the Purple Heart. Howard was the bravest of the brave.
Robert Seals served 22 years in the Army as an infantry and Special Forces officer, retiring in 2004. Currently, he is a command historian living in Raeford, North Carolina.
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Behind the Scenes With a Planner of the Iraq War
Expectation of Valor: Planning the Iraq War. Col. Kevin Benson, USA Ret. Casemate. 272 pages. $34.95
By Col. J.P. Clark, U.S. Army retired
The conventional wisdom regarding the early war in Iraq is that the U.S. military devoted all its effort to planning a blitzkrieg-like campaign but failed to think about what would come after the destruction of the Iraqi army. Retired Col. Kevin Benson persuasively shatters this narrative with Expectation of Valor: Planning the Iraq War, a candid account of his time as the chief of plans for Third U.S. Army from 2002 to 2004.
Expectation of Valor will not suit all readers. Despite the title, battlefield valor remains just out of view. Instead, this is a tale of the grinding, unglamorous work of planners in high-level headquarters. Benson, who has written for ARMY magazine, goes far deeper into the processes and methods of operational planning than any other text of which this reviewer is aware. The six-page glossary will be essential for readers who are not familiar with planning doctrine and jargon.
Benson’s next assignment after Third Army was as director of the famed School of Advanced Military Studies (SAMS), the Army’s training ground for so-called Jedi planners. Readers who would like some insight into the knowledge and experience of a SAMS graduate will find this the perfect insider’s tour of a high-level headquarters getting ready for and then going to war.
Appropriately for the Army’s first major conflict of the 21st century, much of this account is rooted in Benson’s emails from the time. Drawing on these messages and his personal journal, Expectation of Valor is largely a day-by-day account of events. The strength of this organization is that it effectively conveys just how many different problems fill the day of a principal staff officer on a theater army staff.
The price of so viscerally depicting the feel of any given day in a headquarters, simultaneously dealing with so many problems, is that it is sometimes difficult for the reader to follow any one of these threads. Some topics appear multiple times over the course of the narrative, with references several pages apart.
Throughout Expectation of Valor, several themes come to the forefront. One is the importance of personal relationships, personalities and trust among commanders and staff officers. War is no less a human endeavor for generals and colonels than for lieutenants and sergeants. Another theme is the complexity of large-scale combat operations. The movement and employment of large quantities of personnel, equipment, munitions and other supplies over vast distances—all subject to the chance and friction of war—require detailed planning.
Unfortunately, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his senior subordinates distrusted the military, dismissing detailed plans as overly cautious “old think,” as the book recounts. Benson and his planners were forced to devote enormous time to explaining why something that looked easy to Pentagon officials was not wise or sometimes even feasible in the field, while adapting the campaign to changes made by overconfident leaders who often did not understand the full implications of their decisions.
The final theme is how much planning was actually done for Phase IV, the period after the fall of Baghdad. Although Benson and the commanders above him were never able to give as much attention or resources to this planning as they would have liked, the effort began long before the first units even entered Iraq.
Expectation of Valor is a master class in operational planning and high-level staff work. It is a must-read for field grade officers and planners of all services. It also will reward any reader interested in the mechanics of large-scale conflict.
Col. J.P. Clark, U.S. Army retired, served 26 years on active duty. He is the author of Preparing for War: The Emergence of the Modern U.S. Army, 1815–1917. He holds a doctorate in history from Duke University, North Carolina.
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Concealment Comes Out of the Shadows
The Army that Never Was: George S. Patton and the Deception of Operation Fortitude. Taylor Downing. Pegasus Books. 320 pages. $29.95
By Matthew Seelinger
Taylor Downing opens The Army that Never Was: George S. Patton and the Deception of Operation Fortitude by comparing and contrasting two major Allied commanders in Europe: Gens. George Patton Jr. and Bernard Law Montgomery. While the two were effective military commanders, they had different roles for the invasion of France in the summer of 1944. Britain’s Montgomery led the 21st Army Group that hit the beaches of Normandy. Patton headed the First U.S. Army Group, a hoax unit created to deceive the Germans that the Allies would land farther north, in the Pas de Calais.
Downing writes that concealment and deception have always been an important part of warfare and are often the difference between victory and defeat. He then goes into a lengthy examination of the British use of deception in World War II, highlighting its early successes in North Africa at El Alamein in 1942 and in the run-up to Operation Husky, the Allied invasion of Sicily, in 1943. Many of the key figures in the book are introduced here, including British Army Col. Dudley Clarke, who Downing calls the “true founder of strategic deception”; Kim Philby, the notorious Soviet mole in MI6; and Peter Fleming, the brother of spy novelist Ian Fleming. Downing describes these men and others who worked in deception as “inventive, creative, hard-working and often eccentric.” Most were veterans of World War I, came from Britain’s elite classes and were educated at places like Eton College, the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge.
In addition to looking at early British efforts at deception, Downing discusses German military intelligence, the Abwehr organization, and how the British often were able to disguise military movements from German intelligence. In addition, Downing shows how German attempts to gather and analyze intelligence data were hampered by bureaucracy and suspicion within the Nazi state.
Downing then examines Operation Fortitude, part of the larger Operation Bodyguard, which attempted to convince the Germans that the Allies would launch their invasion of France at the Pas de Calais, the narrowest part of the English Channel. He describes the massive effort that went into Fortitude, including the stockpiling of fake landing craft and military equipment, the use of double agents to misinform the Germans and the massive amount of radio traffic generated by the fake First U.S. Army Group (FUSAG).
In the end, Fortitude proved to be more successful than the Allies could have hoped for—weeks after the Normandy landings and expansion of the beachhead, the German high command was still convinced that a second invasion would occur at the Pas de Calais, leaving the bulk of Fifteenth Army idle instead of transferring it to Normandy, where reinforcements were sorely needed.
While Downing includes Patton in his title and provides a good summary of his life and career before his command of FUSAG, he is a minor figure in The Army that Never Was. Apart from describing him as a “team player” as commander of FUSAG, Patton is rarely mentioned in the narrative until Downing’s epilogue. Downing also helps to perpetuate the long-dispelled myth that Patton carried pearl-handled pistols; as most Patton aficionados know, they were ivory-handled.
Downing provides a quick summary of Allied deception efforts after Fortitude, namely the British R Force. Unfortunately, there is no mention of the American 23rd Headquarters Special Troops, also known as the “Ghost Army,” which conducted similar operations against the Germans. The book’s epilogue on the key figures mentioned in the book is a highlight.
Despite its emphasis on British deception efforts, The Army that Never Was will appeal to anyone interested in the efforts that led up to D-Day, June 6, 1944.
Matthew Seelinger is the chief historian at the Army Historical Foundation and editor of the foundation’s quarterly journal, On Point.