Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley Are Transforming the Future of War

"Unit X is a book by people who were doing the things that they describe. So Raj Shah and Christopher Kirchhoff, the authors, ran Unit X, which was a specially set up unit of the Pentagon that was going to take ideas from Silicon Valley that could be useful for defence purposes. They were brought in to revive it, after the original team started to struggle. For me, as the former management editor of the FT , it’s a fascinating book about ‘How do you bring together a gigantic, powerful, but bureaucratic organism like the Pentagon with fast-moving startups impatient to get their inventions out into the world?’ Quite a lot of the book is about the navigation, literally, of the corridors of the Pentagon in order to make this happen. That, in itself, is interesting. It also ticks the box of being a technology book : it’s about what’s happening at the cutting edge of technology. Then the third part of the book is about the military-industrial complex in the 21st century. It puts us in the heart of this question of, ‘What is the moral value of defence in a world where there are actual hot wars out there, into which the Pentagon and other allies of the US are feeding their materiel ?’ It’s right up to date. It only touches on Israel-Iran obliquely, but it covers Ukraine and the Gaza conflict . For me, it’s a fascinating book because it makes you think about the value of these companies and what the crossover is between money making and war making, which is one of the things that they have to broker. How do we make sure that we are harnessing the innate desire of startups to make money to a wider strategic effort? That’s right. He ends up repurposing his $300 hand-held device to give him a more accurate readout. That comes full circle at the end of the book, where they go to Ukraine. We know the Ukrainians have been ingeniously repurposing ordinary kit in order to make more effective defences against the Russians and vice versa. The point the authors make is that the very cheap drones repurposed by the Ukrainians turn out to be far more effective than the very expensive, high spec drones supplied by the Pentagon. It’s that contradiction—we’re not getting the technology that is useful on the battlefield, except by workarounds. It’s a very topical look at this particular kind of crossover."